What NASCAR's Chicago Plan Means for NASCAR and the Windy City

• The NASCAR Cup race is slated to take place on Sunday, July 2, 2023.

• The Cup event will be preceded by an IMSA race the day before, Saturday, July 1.

• The race will supplant Road America on the Cup schedule.

If ever there was a theme song that embodied Tuesday’s major NASCAR announcement, it would be The Doobie Brothers’ “Takin’ It To The Streets.”

That’s because the stock car racing sanctioning body announced that its premier NASCAR Cup series will host the sport’s first race on a temporary street course next July 1-2 in Chicago.

Essentially borrowing a page from IndyCar’s long-time success on temporary street courses such as Long Beach and as recently as this past Sunday in Toronto, the NASCAR race will be held on a layout just to the east of downtown Chicago.

The proposed 12-turn, 2.2-mile street course, with the start/finish line and pit road located along South Columbus Drive directly in front of Buckingham Fountain, will require a significant part of Grant Park—one of the city’s crown jewels, so to speak—to be closed down for potentially as long as two weeks as the track will cut through Columbus Drive (and potentially on Michigan Avenue) that bisects the park.

Also affected will be shutting down another of the city’s crown jewels—but also more importantly, one of the chief thoroughfares into and adjacent to downtown—namely, DuSable Lake Shore Drive. It’s expected the track layout will also sweep by Soldier Field, where the NFL’s Chicago Bears play. City officials did not discuss how that part of the plan will be work, as shutting down a busy thoroughfare like Lake Shore Drive, particularly on a holiday weekend, will likely cause extensive traffic backups.

Bubba Wallace, driver of the No. 23 XI Toyota for co-owners Denny Hamlin and legendary former Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan, was one of several drivers on hand for the announcement. Jordan, however, was surprisingly not part of the announcement.

“Bringing NASCAR to this demographic, we talk about how much representation matters, I think exposing this sport to this area, downtown, with so much to do around while the race is going on is super important,” Wallace said.

After the press conference, Wallace hopped in his race car—painted with McDonald’s sponsorship, as the company’s headquarters are in Chicago—and did a lap around the downtown area, including a good part of what is expected to be the final race layout.

“Like the Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum, we seized an incredible opportunity to add an unprecedented element to our schedule and take center stage in the heart of another major metropolitan market,” Ben Kennedy, NASCAR senior vice president of racing development and strategy, said in a statement. “This is the ideal setting for the first-ever NASCAR Cup Series street race.

The Cup race is slated to take place on Sunday, July 2, 2023, and will be preceded by an IMSA race the day before, Saturday, July 1.

While the sport is obviously excited about this first-time event, which is slated for a three-year contract with the city of Chicago from 2023 through 2025, the race will supplant Road America on the Cup schedule.

NASCAR had raced the Cup Series for just two years at Road America in central Wisconsin, most recently just over two weeks ago on July 3. The sanctioning agreement between NASCAR and the track expired after this year’s race there and it’s unlikely NASCAR will return to the four-plus-mile road course in the near future.

Another element of the situation is that NASCAR raced for nearly 20 years in the Chicago area at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Illinois, a suburb of the Windy City approximately 50 miles southwest of downtown, but attendance issues plagued the track, particularly the last five years, even though the track hosted the kickoff to the Cup playoffs those years.

Chicagoland Speedway has not hosted any type of NASCAR race—be it Cup, Xfinity or Trucks—since 2019. Numerous reports and rumors have claimed the track is destined to be demolished at some point and the land will be used for industrial and commercial purposes.

A NASCAR insider recently told Autoweek that there reportedly is a potential backup plan to once again race at CLS if the first and/or second year of the three-year street race plan proves disappointing attendance-wise.

It’s also expected that local environmental groups and activists will protest against the plan for races.

And there is one other concern that will have to be addressed: crime in Chicago has been a major factor, including upticks over the last few years in murders (794 in 2021 and 351 thus far this year, including 42 already in the current month of July), shootings (1,255 from Jan. 1 to July 1), armed robberies and especially carjackings (over 1,800 just in the city alone in 2021 and already more than 1,200 in 2022).

Much of the crime in Chicago has also recently started to span out across the entire suburban area, as well.

Perhaps very telling is how the local NBC and FOX affiliates—their parent networks both televise NASCAR races—played the story. While the local NBC affiliate led its 4 p.m. CT news with the NASCAR story, the local FOX affiliate did not run the story until nearly 30 minutes into the broadcast.

Follow Autoweek contributor Jerry Bonkowski on Twitter @JerryBonkowski