Yahoo Autos NASCAR’s Kennedy explains the thinking behind the 2024 schedule tweaks
At first glance, the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series schedule is not significantly different to this year’s.
The L.A. Coliseum is back, as is North Wilkesboro and the Chicago street course. And the only two off weekends won’t come until late July because of the Olympics. This means teams will run 23 straight weekends before hitting the break.
However, there were a few date changes for tracks next season that are different. Daytona is not the regular season finale, while there are now two road courses in the postseason. Bristol will also no longer be covered in dirt.
Upon the release of the 2024 schedule, NASCAR’s Ben Kennedy, the senior vice president of racing development and strategy, addressed a few different topics. Here is what Kennedy had to say.
On moving Atlanta to the second race of the season and having two drafting tracks (Atlanta and Talladega) in the postseason:
BEN KENNEDY: So, a number of things as we think about the movement of the Atlanta dates. For starters, as you think about the spring date, the Daytona 500 is our biggest event of the year, and we carry a lot of momentum in the early part of our season. Seeing how Atlanta has played out over the past couple of years from a racing product perspective, obviously, we want to see how it both started and evolved over the repave, and after seeing several races play out in Atlanta, it felt like it made sense to move it into that second slot after Daytona. It was a natural fit for us seeing that we’re not returning to Auto Club next year.
As we think about heading to the West Coast Swing and Vegas and Phoenix, and then introducing it to the playoffs was kind of a myriad of things. Again, the racing product and what we’ve seen so far, the positive fan sentiment that we’ve seen around what it looks like on-track, and then we felt like it was an opportunity to introduce a little bit of variety to the schedule in the playoffs. Introducing a drafting-style track like Atlanta to the Round of 16, to follow it up with Watkins Glen and then the Bristol Night Race is really going to test the variability of our drivers and their skills as they think about punching their ticket to the Round of 12. Something we wanted to do that was a little bit different and shake it up a bit.
Whether the door is closed on having a dirt race on the schedule again in the future:
BK: We haven’t, no. We’re certainly open to dirt racing, whether it be with our Cup Series, Xfinity Series or Craftsman Truck Series. [It’s] something we’re going to continue to consider. After we’ve seen racing on the dirt at Bristol play out for the past few years and hearing some of the fan feedback, we felt like it was an opportunity for us to shake things up a bit, move back to the concrete surface in the spring, and move back to all asphalt and concrete tracks for ’24.
That said, as we think about what the future looks like, dirt racing does have a unique place in motor sports. A lot of our drivers came from dirt racing. Some of the best racing that I’ve personally seen was on dirt. Do I think there’s going to be a dirt race sometime in the future? I think so. What that track looks like or what the time is, we’ll see, but it’s something we’re going to keep our pulse on, for sure.
NASCAR’s Cup Series will be dirt-free next year, but beyond that, who knows? Motorsport Images
“Similar to some of these unique styles of tracks like street courses, if it does come back on the schedule, I don’t think it’s going to be something where we have 15 different dirt tracks. It might be one or two that we’d have throughout the year and really make it something special.
The decision to change the regular-season finale racetrack:
BK: I’ve really enjoyed Daytona as a regular season cutoff race. For the past few years, it’s been exciting, it’s been unpredictable, it’s created a lot of storylines. Next year, with us taking two weeks during the Olympics and naturally moving the end of our season back one week shifts that, and we had a lot of conversations about, does Daytona continue to stay as a regular season (race) and do you swap it with Darlington?
We felt like Darlington on Labor Day Weekend and being that race is something that’s core to us and something that’s special to our fans, so it’s something we wanted to keep in place and really test out as we think about for 2024, seeing that it is a little bit different. I know that ’25 is going to look different. Naturally, we’ll be in our new media rights agreement, so it won’t be an Olympic year, so I think the schedule overall will have a lot of variability to it as we think about ’25. Does that mean we’ll be back at Daytona? Potentially. Does that mean Daytona is a regular-season cutoff race? Potentially. We’re going to look at all scenarios, and part of it will also be looking at seeing how Darlington is as a cutoff race for the regular season.
Why there are no mid-week races:
BK: We talked a lot about midweek races. We’ve had conversations about double-headers. I can’t tell you how many scenarios we went through. We ended up with our 24th version of the schedule.
There are a number of different variations that we go through as we think about building the schedule, and those were some of our considerations. We got to see a lot of that play out, especially during COVID in 2021. That said, we felt like it was in our best interest to try to keep most of our interest on Saturday nights or Sundays. As we’ve mentioned in the past, a lot of our fans are accustomed to tuning into races on Sunday afternoons. We see some of our strongest ratings and viewership and attendance on Sunday afternoons, so we felt like it was important to really protect that as we think about 2024.
Does it mean that it looks a little bit different on the ’24 schedule? It does. I think as we’ve said, we’re going to continue to test and edit it. Is the schedule ever going to be perfect? It’s not. It’s going to be a journey for us. But I think seeing how Darlington plays off as a regular season finale, Atlanta and Watkins Glen in the playoffs, introducing some of that innovation just gives us more data as we think about building out new schedules.
