NASCAR Wakes Up New York with World’s Loudest Billboard

Start your engines! NASCAR’s marketing is off to the races this season with some creative, loud activations courtesy of creative agency 72andSunny LA.

The brand’s new platform for 2026, ‘Hell Yeah’, has accelerated rapidly into the US public consciousness thanks to a major stunt in New York’s Times Square – the ‘World’s Loudest Billboard’. Certified by Guinness World Records live on FOX, the billboard featured a 1:1 replica NASCAR Next Gen engine.

When activated by driver Ross Chastain, the engine revved and smoked, and the billboard played the real sounds of a NASCAR cup car, allowing people in one of the world’s most iconic urban settings to hear and feel the raw power of stock-car racing ahead of the Daytona 500.

“Setting a Guinness World Records title is a proud moment for our sport and serves as a bold statement to get the 2026 season started,” said Tim Clark, NASCAR’s chief brand officer in a press statement. “The billboard puts the visceral energy of NASCAR front and centre and invites everyone to experience what makes our sport so unique.”

Built in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the engine was developed by 72andSunny in partnership with Guru House, with consultation from leading NASCAR engine builders, ECR and HMS.

“It was a pretty meticulous process,” says 72andSunny LA’s chief creative officer Zach Hilder, speaking with LBB. “We sourced the engine, worked with mechanics to get the belts to move like an actual engine, recorded real audio directly from a cup car, and crafted it all together to bring to life the real engine without the dangers of fuel injectors or fire hazards.”

The CCO posits that a billboard which makes noise is already an interesting starting point for an ad, and describes how the idea quickly developed into fixing a “ribcage-rattling NASCAR V8” onto a billboard and “letting people rev the hell out of it”.

After a meticulous location scouting process across four major cities, and many conversations around permitting and safety precautions, the decision to place the billboard dead centre in one of the loudest cities on earth – and one not frequently associated with NASCAR – provided “an inherent collision of cultures,” adds Zach. “We also thought it would be fun to wake up a bunch of New Yorkers on their way to work.”

New York City and Times Square also offered some favourable marketing permits, which gave the 72andSunny team comfort to activate there. Despite getting all the permits for the noise and the build, both the New York Fire Department and New York Police Department stopped the team on the day to investigate the activation.

“They got complaints and tried to shut us down, but we said, ‘HELL NO’, and we had the permits to back us up.”

As well as creating a worthwhile spectacle on the ground, the agency paid close attention to every detail so that the project remained authentic to the sport. “One of the biggest things we were focused on and crafted to the very end was trying to make this massively heavy engine feel like it was breaking out of the asphalt,” says Zach. “Up until the day before the activation when we were installing in Times Square, we were working with a scenic team to craft and add elements to increase the illusion.

“That, and we were constantly tweaking the audio, trying to perfectly match the feeling and sound of the revs in a cup car as fans slowly pushed the pedal towards full bore.”

The ‘Hell Yeah’ brand refresh also includes a new spot developed by Concept80 that launched earlier this month. That film and this record-setting moment serve as the launch point for NASCAR’s 2026 season – a grand, roaring statement that embodies NASCAR’s brand.

“We want to create experiences that elicit a ‘HELL YEAH!’,” says Zach. “That means escalating and elevating things to a highly visceral, undeniably NASCAR level.”

In this vein, 72andSunny has also developed another special build – one that highlights another of the motorsport’s unique selling points. In this ‘Hell Yeah’ spirit, the agency created a driveable beer cooler that’s sure to turn heads anywhere from Bowman Gray Stadium to Talladega Superspeedway.

The insight, Zach shares, was simple: “Most sporting arenas ban coolers from entry. Not NASCAR. They encourage it.

“So we wanted to take a tried and trusted beer cooler to a much cooler place – because nothing says, ‘HELL YEAH!’ like chugging a beer on a hot day while ripping around a NASCAR campground.”

It’s clear this platform and 72andSunny won’t be seeing the chequered flag for some time, as the NASCAR season speeds off and ‘Hell Yeah’ hits fifth gear with increasingly loud and hard-to-ignore branded moments.