Nashville Street Race Will Be the 2024 IndyCar Season Finale

The Nashville Grand Prix is an early success for IndyCar, packing big crowds into the center of a growing city in both races held since the event was founded in 2021. Now, the race is stepping up to a much bigger role: IndyCar announced Thursday that Nashville would be the season finale and assumed championship-deciding race in 2024.

Actual races run at Nashville have received more mixed reviews than the event itself. An overly tight track with odd-flowing corners has produced its share of crashes, including one that sent the front half of eventual race-winner Marcus Ericsson's car into the air in the inaugural event. A newly announced reconfiguration will hope to fix that next year.

The new-for-2024 layout is still built around both sides of the Cumberland River, but the majority of the race has been moved onto the more dense southern side. That means the track itself has a much simpler layout made up mostly of right-hand corners, and it also allows the final two corners of the track to cross through the city's popular Broadway district. Construction on a new stadium for the Tennessee Titans reduced the total portion of the Northern part of the city available to the track, leaving the circuit with a smaller and more strangely-shaped pit lane awkwardly packed around the turn 3 hairpin.

While it is at least different, the new layout is no more traditional than what IndyCar runs now. As an event, the series will benefit from the opportunity to showcase itself in an event that can take over an entertainment-focused city like Nashville. As a race track, the new layout looks like just as much of a recipe for chaos as the outgoing one IndyCar will race on this weekend.

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