Tanner Foust will return to Nitrocross for his first full season in the rallycross-like championship since 2021 when the series’s 2024-25 season kicks-off at Richmond Raceway next weekend.
The American will race for Olsbergs MSE in the top-level Group E class, reuniting with the team that gave him the first three of his four US rallycross titles. His teammates will be brothers Kevin and Oliver Eriksson, who have both won races in the series – the two are sons of the team’s founder Andreas Eriksson, a former teammate of Foust’s.
“The Group E championship, to date, is the only professional rallycross events I’ve ever missed in the U.S. since the sport came here, and I was involved in bringing the sport to the U.S. with Andreas Eriksson,” Foust told RACER. “I’ve worked with him, I’ve known his kids since they were snotty little kids covered in mud running through the Swedish forests. Now I’m going to be racing alongside them, which is very cool.”
Foust competed in the first two standalone Nitrocross events (then known at Nitro Rallycross) for Volkswagen Andretti Rallycross at Utah Motorsports Campus in 2018 and ‘19, finishing third in the former. He then ran the full 2021 season – the last contested with combustion-engined cars in the premier class – with JC Raceteknik in an Audi S1. Aside from appearances at the two Utah races last season for XITE Energy Racing, Foust has been absent in the championship’s single make electric ‘Group E’ era, but the fleeting appearance left a strong impression.
“I did an event last year in Utah where I drove for XITE Racing, and was impressed with how the schedule unfolded, the quality of the racing and the quality of the car that OMSE built,” he said. “Then I went to Vegas to give rides for the series in the Happy Dad car. I gave rides to a lot of execs from NASCAR, from car manufacturers, and the interest in the series from some of the big players in U.S. motorsport is awesome.
“The series is at a point in its life where it has the potential to grow exponentially over the next few years.”
Since Foust’s last full season in Nitrocross, the Travis Pastrana-led series has undergone massive changes behind the scenes, with UFC magnate Dana White among the investors, and Foust now believes the discipline is in a strong place after a tumultuous decade with previous series.
“I’ve certainly watched what Travis has done with the series, what new ownership with Dana White and Thrill One has done with the series, and I think it’s a turning point where it really can be a series that helps keep motorsport moving forward as we enter the alternate fuel era of transport,” said Foust. “I’m excited to be a part of that as an advocate for motorsport in general.
“They have a great management group. I think they’ve found their legs. They’ve got a better understanding of what tracks work, what tracks don’t. They’ve got a great schedule – it is a challenging schedule in that it crosses over the calendar year, but it is a fully U.S. based schedule, which does make it a little bit simpler to raise sponsorship money for the championship.”
Foust will race with backing from Optima Batteries, a long-time backer of his, in a deal that goes beyond signing checks and wrapping the car. Its parent company Clarios is the world’s largest battery manufacturer, with one in three cars – of any kind or manufacturer – coming off the production line with on of its batteries fitted as standard.
“Optima batteries was my first racing sponsor in 1997. A marketing exec at Optima batteries gave me $500 to go buy a set of tires for a spec Ford racer,” he recalled. “That same marketing exec is now head of marketing, and is the same guy who I’ve partnered with [from] Optima batteries and now their parent company, Clarios, in a pretty exciting relationship that has endless potential.
“It is rare to find large corporations that are excited about motorsport these days, so I’m pretty thrilled to be working with Clarios and with Optima to prove some of their new technologies and batteries, but also to keep motorsport alive.”
Foust’s partnership with Optima is set to have wider benefits for the rest of the Nitrocross field, with technology set to be trialled in the near future that could be implemented for everyone, which could eventually see lithium battery technology fall by the wayside.
“I’m about long term relationship,” said the former-McLaren Extreme E racer. “I was with Rockstar for 18 years, so if you’re going to make a long term relationship, that has to make sense over time.
“They (Optima) have new tech coming out, which we’re hoping to use in the FC1-X,” Foust said. “They have a sodium ion battery – it fits somewhere between an AGM battery and a lithium battery in weight, so it’s lighter than a normal AGM battery, but it’s more powerful also, and it’s made of wood, salt, iron and water. It’s incredibly easy to make from a resource standpoint and it’s the next step beyond lithium.
“We’re planning on proving that tech by running them in these cars in these harsh environments … [to] get people comfortable with the technology and understand how it works.”
Foust returns to Nitrocross as the holder of almost every record there is to have in U.S. rallycross, among them — four titles (across Rally America, Global Rallycross, and Americas Rallycross) and 24 event wins. He insists maintaining those records in the face of Robin Larsson’s current series dominance isn’t a driving factor in his return.
“I think I had 25 heat wins in a row, so I don’t think he’s going to get that one,” Foust said. “Records are made to be broken. I’ve been fortunate enough to have some world records and different records in different series, and it’s never that much of a disappointment when they’re broken. It’s just great that the sport stays healthy and keeps moving forward.
“[The progress is] inspiring, and it drives you to maybe push a little bit harder. You know, coming in after these guys have had two or three years under their belts in the cars, it would be aggressive to think that you’re going to take the championship in the first year, but we’re going to push to win it.”