Following his titanic round-one win over reigning Funny Car champion Austin Prock Sunday at the season-opening Amalie Motor Oil NHRA Gatornationals, outspoken veteran driver Bob Tasca III took his opportunity on the microphone with FS1 reporter Amanda Busick not to discuss the matchup or his weekend at-large, but to take aim at the FOX network over what he felt was an egregious promotional error.

Tasca’s comment stems from a line in the script of a series of IndyCar promotional commercials that began airing in early 2025 — including during February’s NFL Super Bowl — proclaiming the open-wheel series as the fastest racing on earth. That, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth, and Tasca took issue with it.

“I want to say it to the fans: I’m very disappointed with Fox Sports’s,” he began. “All winter we heard about ‘The fastest motorsports on the planet,’ and I was a little confused because I didn’t see that PPG Mustang when I saw that ad. And I didn’t see that [Austin] Prock car over there. Truth is, it’s an insult to our fans and to the drivers for FOX to go on TV and say the fastest motorsport in the world, and it’s IndyCar? Come on now, I didn’t think it was Fake News Network on FOX.”

FOX and IndyCar agreed to a blockbuster deal in June for the network to take over broadcasting rights in 2025 and beyond, and it began airing the series of creative commercials promoting its most popular drivers in the lead-up to the new season, closing with the line “fastest racing on earth.” It’s important to note that FOX, the parent company of FS1, is also the broadcast partner of the NHRA, and that such a bold yet false claim could be approved to air when a faster motorsport exists in its own portfolio is a comedic error at best.

Photo: NHRA/National Dragster

Bob Tasca would be remiss in taking the comment to heart, as he and the man he raced in the opening round on Sunday both share the fastest wheel-driven speeds in the history of drag racing — right down to the hundredth of a mile-per-hour at 341.68 mph. Technically speaking, land-speed competitions are the fastest form of racing, albeit drivers do not compete head-to-head, so there’s a distinction to be made. But the NHRA boasts five different categories with speeds that exceed even the fastest straightaway speed of a modern IndyCar, which checks in at right at 240 mph in qualifying trim.