NASCAR MEDIA CONFERENCE

February 13, 2026

Eric Nyquist

Jeff Broin

Press Conference

An Interview with:

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, and welcome to the first NASCAR impact partnership announcement for the 2026 season. When NASCAR Impact was first announced, it was designed to serve as a platform to advance progress both on and off the track.

The inaugural Impact report, which was just released a few weeks ago, highlights those accomplishments both in the community and NASCAR's work to strive towards innovation on the competition side.

To that end, NASCAR is proud to welcome POET, the world's largest producer of biofuels, as our official bioethanol partner beginning with the 2026 season.

Joining us today is Eric Nyquist, chief impact officer of NASCAR, and Jeff Broin, founder and CEO of POET. We'll first open it up for Jeff to share a little bit more about this new partnership.

JEFF BROIN: All right, thank you. POET is excited to be here today to announce this historic partnership with NASCAR and introduce zero carbon biofuel to the world. POET's plant-based, high-impact bioethanol delivers maximum performance with zero life cycle carbon emissions.

And not only is the fuel available at the NASCAR track, it's also available commercially at several of our bioprocessing facilities across the country.

This is the same 15% bioethanol blend that has successfully powered NASCAR for the last 15 years. The difference is this bioethanol has zero life cycle carbon emissions.

By combining regenerative farming practices with advanced biotechnology, POET has forever changed the future of liquid fuels. Bioethanol is not only high-octane and high performance, it reduces harmful emissions, making it healthier for every driver, crewmember, and fan at the track.

We can't wait to put the zero carbon American-made bioethanol to work on NASCAR tracks across the country in some of the most challenging conditions available anywhere. It's truly a great American fuel for the great American race. Thank you.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Jeff. This announcement makes NASCAR the first league to utilize American-made zero carbon bioethanol in its competition vehicles.

Eric, how important is that commitment to innovation within the context of competition to your organization?

ERIC NYQUIST: Yeah, you bet. Obviously when it comes to our race fuel, it starts and stops with superior performance in our competition product.

That's part of why we're aligned here with POET with the technology, the innovation they're bringing forward. As Jeff said, we've been proud to partner with the American ethanol industry at large for the last 15 years working with our great partners at Sunoco to produce what we think is the best race fuel in racing, and we're going to continue moving that forward.

This partnership with POET and the innovation, technology that they're bringing forward is going to allow us as well to explore working with our partner Sunoco and POET with the potential of changes and the percentage of our ethanol that's in the fuel over time. Something we'll look at carefully.

All the while, thanks again to the innovation of POET and the ethanol they're producing, it allows us to make a really nice move in a lighthouse fashion that shows to the world what we can do in our commitment as a member of the racing community to continue to push innovation and make sure we have as the obligation to the automotive industry and the racing community, that we're pushing the front of technology around how we operate efficiently and what we use to power our vehicles.

THE MODERATOR: We'll open it up to questions.

Q. I have a question for each of you. When you talk about changing the percentage, what are some of the benefits of having the different percentages in the future? Because this is well beyond my area of expertise.

ERIC NYQUIST: It's a great question. Obviously this is something that will be subject to great testing and working across the industry. You know, ethanol has a nice benefit of bringing higher octane benefits to our fuel. Obviously it's a cleaner burning element as well that we can bring forward to making important improvements to the efficiency of our fuel and what it brings to the environment.

Ultimately, any testing that we'll do on this or any move forward will be a function of guaranteeing that what we're putting forward is a superior race fuel product.

Again, that's something that will be done in conjunction with our great fuel partners at Sunoco along with the folks at POET.

Q. Jeff, looking through the press release and all the information that's been provided to us, I know energy independence is kind of a key part of that. Can you talk about the importance of that whole aspect?

JEFF BROIN: Yeah, well, quite frankly, our whole industry got started using surplus grain in America. My father set aside 20% of his land and grew weeds on it for the U.S. government. I mean, this is not only creating markets for farmers, but really driving a new fuel.

It's gone from 1 billion gallons to 16 billion gallons of production capacity in the U.S. It's created a 5 billion bushels of corn demand, and just been a real boon to the midwest economy and kind of the entire country, while also putting an American-made fuel in the gas tank.

Q. Jeff, as an old-school guy, I remember leaded fuel and all that. I'm trying to wrap my head around this. What's the process and the technology that your company uses to produce an ethanol without any sort of carbon emissions impact?

JEFF BROIN: That's a great question. So we're actually combining regenerative farming. So farming has advanced a lot in the past 15 years, so farmers are now using things like cover crops, reduced tillage, organic fertilizers, precision application to significantly lower their carbon footprint. Sometimes to one-third of what it was just ten years ago. That's part of the calculus.

In addition, we're using the biotechnology developed by our company, which is lower carbon all the time, and also we're using the sale of bioCO2 to replace CO2 that comes from hydrocarbon-based sources.

And so when you add those together, you get a zero carbon. We're doing it some up to a minus 14 carbon, believe it or not.

You can go to our website, POET.com/NASCAR; POET.com/zero is another page. You can learn more about that. We have the waterfall chart there, so you can look at it.

Q. Interesting. Eric, good to see you. Impact guy. What does this mean for the sport's impact objectives to decrease this carbon emissions?

ERIC NYQUIST: You know, obviously we're a huge sport. We move around the country as a large industry. The impact that we leave in our communities, whether it's around the environments or it's our commitment to community, our partnerships with the military, it's been a core principle of this sport from the very get-go I would assert.

When it comes to reducing our emissions, the race cars we put forward, that's the show, but it's a relative drop in the bucket.

I do think it's important, though, that we're demonstrating smartly. We can never compromise the competition product at all, but where we can continue to -- where there are places where we can have are superior performance, and at the same time demonstrate to our fans that we can have our cake and eat it too on both. These are things that we look towards.

Over time, you know, smartly we as an industry where we can find those gains, as we work together where we can lower our footprint, and really that's about being efficient and caring about the environments.

Our fans love to hunt and fish and camp and hike, so generally as a motorsports community, it's important that we understand the role that we play in the larger paradigm, and that we're always constantly looking where we can make gains and improvements.

I think this is a really nice step, thanks to Jeff, the technology they're bringing, the leadership they're putting forward here.

JEFF BROIN: I would add that NASCAR is being innovative here as well and really driving the future by stepping forward and putting this in the tank. It's a proven product, the E15, but it's pretty cool that NASCAR has taken this step forward. Very impressive.

Q. For Jeff, I'm sure the first question that the race teams would ask is, how does the POET bioethanol improve the performance of the Sunoco racing fuel? Same question for consumers at the pump, how exactly does that work?

JEFF BROIN: Number one would be octane, right? It's a big octane component in the gasoline. It's cleaner burning. It's got oxygen in it. When you burn straight ethanol, you get carbon dioxide and water, and it helps lower emissions from the other gasoline, but it also helps the other gasoline burn slightly more efficiently, which lowers other harmful emissions.

Many benefits. It works fantastic. It eliminates the need for my type of heat product in your car, because if there's any tiny amount of water in your tank, it will absorb it and put it through your fuel system. Many, many, many benefits both for NASCAR and for consumers.

Also, lower priced. It also lowers the cost of gasoline at the same time. I should add that too.

Q. Jeff, this question is for you. Could you just talk a little bit about how special and cool this is going to be for all the employees to see the presence that you have in the Daytona 500?

JEFF BROIN: My employees?

Q. Yeah. For the company, this is such a big moment.

JEFF BROIN: We have 2,600 employees across the midwest. They're going to be very excited. We have a lot of NASCAR fans within our organization, and I think they'll be really excited to see this product perform on the world stage. It's very cool.

ERIC NYQUIST: I would just like to add, too, for us, for 15 years we've had the benefit of partnering with effectively the American farmer and the American ethanol industry worker. It's brought a lot of great benefits to our sport.

But it's nice when we're able to do something that's improving racing, is demonstrating a commitment to the community, and is at the same time helping energy independence, the heartland of this country, and really integrating with a lot of our core fans.

So it's not often we get to do things like that where it's win, win, win, win, win across the board, but this is definitely one of them.

THE MODERATOR: Jeff, we're proud to have you and POET as part of the NASCAR family. Thank you.