NASCAR sets a date with history in Chicago for first street race. Here’s the course
The NASCAR Cup Series will visit Chicago next year — and it’ll make history when it does.
NASCAR announced Tuesday that it will break into the third-largest media market in the U.S. when it hosts a first-of-its-kind street course race on July 2, 2023, in downtown Chicago.
This means NASCAR’s top drivers will be maneuvering the streets of one of the biggest cities in the U.S. — a prospect imagined and piloted in the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series last summer but never actualized until now.
“This is a top-three market for us, worldwide frankly, for NASCAR fans,” Ben Kennedy, NASCAR senior vice president of racing development and strategy, told reporters with a cluster of Chicago skyscrapers behind him. “It was important from that perspective. Certainly the city’s support has been fantastic. For us to be able to do our very first street race in downtown Chicago is just going to be a spectacle for fans to see.”
The agreement between the city of Chicago and NASCAR reportedly stipulates that the race will be held for three consecutive years beginning in 2023.
The course will transform Lake Shore Drive, Michigan Avenue, Columbus Drive and “select surrounding throughfares” into a 12-turn, 2.2-mile street course that starts and ends at iconic Buckingham Fountain. Along the way, drivers will pass through some of the most memorable parts of the city, including Grant Park and Soldier Field.
“Listen, when we did the esports (event), it was like a love letter to the city of Chicago,” Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot told reporters on Tuesday. “So why not take advantage of the opportunity to break through the noise and let a worldwide audience see the beauty and splendor of our city from the perspective of a NASCAR race?”
In a corresponding move, Sports Business Journal reported Road America will lose its Cup Series race in 2023 to make room for the new Chicago event. The remainder of the 2023 schedules for the Cup Series, NASCAR Xfinity Series, NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and IMSA will be announced at a later date, per the association.
The race will be televised on NBC.
Cup Series driver Bubba Wallace said that making a bold move like this is important to the future of NASCAR.
“It’s exciting,” Wallace said. “I think as Mayor Lightfoot said earlier, being in this city, bringing NASCAR to this demographic, we talk about how representation matters, and I think exposing this sport to this area, downtown, with so much to do around while the race is going on is super important.”
He continued: “You’re going to get that next Bubba Wallace that’s sitting in the stands like I was when I was nine years old to be like, ‘Hey, I want to do this one day, but I want to be better.’ And I’m going to tell them, good luck.”
The significance of NASCAR-Chicago race
Tuesday’s announcement is big for several reasons.
It marks a moment of innovation for a sport rooted in tradition. It also adds a big event in a major market — an initiative that has been carried out in recent years with the addition of the Busch Light Clash at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which held its popular inaugural Cup Series race in February — and it continues to meaningfully expand the footprint of a sport culturally linked to the South.
Perhaps most interestingly, though, the announcement marks an acknowledgment of the strength of Formula 1 Racing, NASCAR’s rapidly growing competitor.
Interest among Americans in F1 has boomed in recent years. The race series, which for decades has been a worldwide phenomenon, is among the fastest growing sports in the U.S.
Some of that hype is thanks to a wildly popular Netflix documentary on F1 racing that first aired in 2019, Drive to Survive. Some of that is because ESPN re-picked up the sport on its networks in 2018. (Per Yahoo, ESPN’s networks averaged 930,000 viewers for F1 races in 2021 after scoring an average audience of 608,000 viewers in 2020. It notched more U.S. viewers ages 18-49 than NASCAR’s race at Darlington in May.)
But a lot of the success F1 has enjoyed comes from the sport itself, what with how open-wheeled cars zoom around street courses and do so in bustling metropolises filled with young people. And it appears that NASCAR is trying to emulate that in its own way.
“I’d say of all the changes, this is our boldest change in the schedule,” Kennedy said. “We’ve said, and it’s been pretty synonymous when we announce the schedules, that we want to be bold and innovative and we think about new venues and new concepts that we’re going to. This is No. 1 on the list for us right now, and it’s certainly going to be the most anticipated event of our season and one of the biggest sport events in our country in 2023.”
NASCAR Chicago Street Race Course
This story was originally published July 19, 2022 at 3:30 PM.
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