NASCAR Drivers Air Early Concerns with Chicago Street Circuit

NASCAR’s venture onto Chicago’s city streets is still a month away, but a few drivers are already noting some issues they’ll face in the sanctioning body’s first-ever street course race.

Kyle Busch has tested the course in iRacing and described some of the corners as “really, really tight.” He has also looked at it on the simulator and noted there were cones where the walls will be when one exits the corners.

“You’re coming down this straightaway and there’s another straightaway there, but the ground, the road is separated with a wall in the middle and there’s cones that are blocking off where they don’t want you to go, so I thought that was weird,” Busch said.

“I’m like, just extend the wall, but maybe they don’t want to extend the wall because they need areas for safety crews to get out. I’m not the scientist on that. It just seemed weird when you’re coming around the corner and you’ve got to miss the end of a wall.”

Austin Cindric, who spent the early years of his career racing on road courses, says the biggest challenge is track conditions, which includes remembering that runoff areas don’t exist on street courses.

“Like Circuit of the Americas, the last road course we ran on, I could screw up and go 100 feet into the runoff and keep going,” Cindric said. “Whereas Chicago, or any street courses, there is zero room for error.

“Whether it’s track blockages or guys making mistakes, having cautions throughout the race, all types of those things I think will be different and come into play differently than they would on most of our road courses because a mistake is damage. It’s not lost time.”

The Chicago Street Race is scheduled for July 1-2.