Sunday’s third episode of Chicago Street Race may have been NASCAR’s final blast through the Windy City. Shane van Gisbergen swept the weekend with his second Cup win in three years and back-to-back Xfinity victories on Chicago’s downtown street course. But how the race ended may be the least important aspect of what went on Sunday.
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All week, virtually every Cup driver was quizzed whether they believed Sunday’s race would be the final one to be held in Chicago. While NASCAR and Chicago officials initially agreed to a 10-year agreement to hold the first-ever street race in the sport’s history, it came with a caveat: only the first three years of the decade-long agreement were guaranteed.
The remaining seven races are NASCAR’s option whether to return to town or not, and none of the sanctioning body’s top officials have publicly said anything about the race’s future — or rather, a lack of it.
That’s why Sunday’s event had a rather unusual vibe — like a going away party, if not a funeral wake. Will NASCAR come back to Chicago next year?
There’s been plenty of speculation in the last couple of weeks that NASCAR is considering holding a new street race in several other markets, most notably San Diego and Philadelphia, or possibly north of the border in Vancouver or Toronto.
Not having a race in Chicago will be a difficult pill to swallow for Midwest racing fans, as NASCAR has made real progress toward one of the main reasons it created a street race in the first place: to gain new fans, particularly among the black and brown communities. Even Sunday’s race grand marshal, former Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose, admitted he’s now a NASCAR fan.
If there will no longer be a street race in Chicago, there is one option that NASCAR has if it wants to retain its presence in Chi-town — well, at least in the metro area. NASCAR still owns Chicagoland Speedway (CLS) in Joliet, Illinois, about 50 miles away.
To accommodate a new market like San Diego and a potential return to CLS could be problematic as NASCAR would likely have to expand the schedule to 38 races from its current 36 races (not including two non-points events) — which many drivers may not support — or take away a race from an existing market to accommodate a new event — unless a new market replaces the Chicago street race.
With the exception of a bumpy and weathered racing surface, the overall facility at CLS is still in decent shape and likely would need minimal work to bring it back to race-ready conditions. NASCAR raced at CLS from 2001 through 2019 before it took Chicago off the schedule until the street race came into existence nearly four years later.
One of the reasons why the race at CLS struggled was attendance — or lack thereof. Over the course of its lifetime, its original 92,000-seat capacity was whittled away several times to where it currently has about 47,000 seats left.
That may seem a bit too low to do justice to a weekend that would feature all three of NASCAR’s main series — Cup, Xfinity and Trucks — as CLS previously did from 2009 to 2019. In a way, NASCAR needs Chicago and Chicago needs NASCAR.
