The retired racing icon Kevin Harvick was one of the biggest supporters of NASCAR when it decided to hold its 2022 pre-season exhibition race in the LA Memorial Coliseum. He showered high praise on the guts of the sanctioning body to try something completely new and draw the attention of motorsport fans worldwide. Nearly three years later, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the governing body’s foray into uncharted waters.
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For the past three seasons, NASCAR traveled to the Coliseum for the Clash. The repetitiveness of the event more than saturated what the venue positively did in the first place. With the Bowman Gray Stadium recently announced as the new host of the Clash in 2025, Harvick hopes that this mistake won’t be repeated. That is, he does not want to return to Bowman Gray for a while after 2025.
The Clash is coming to the "Madhouse."
The NASCAR Cup Series will race at Bowman Gray Stadium for the first time since 1971. pic.twitter.com/m75oiQIBAO
— NASCAR on NBC (@NASCARonNBC) August 17, 2024
He elaborated on his podcast, “My hope is that we don’t do it again. And if we do it again, it’s in another 10 or 15 years. I really would love to see us get to the point where we go to places like this… We just show up and we race and we put on a spectacular show. And everybody’s talking about it until the next time that you show back up there. I hope we don’t overdo it like we did at the Coliseum.”
The Bowman Gray Stadium is a quarter-mile-long short track that held NASCAR races in the 1960s. The Winston-Salem region that it sits in is home to a large crowd of die-hard racing fans who would love nothing more than to see their home track back on the schedule. Harvick loves the very idea of going to such a historic venue but is wary of oversaturating it at the same time.
Will the Chicago Street Course bear the same fate as the Coliseum?
Explaining what went wrong at the Coliseum, Harvick pointed out how the second year at the venue was received with diluted excitement followed by the third year bearing essentially no fan interest at all. Does he think the Chicago Street Course will similarly fall out of favor? No. He details the reason, “The Chicago street race that’s a legit race, right? That’s a big investment that they made into that particular event. But that event is spectacular.”
“Maybe it was just the fact that we were in Southern California, I don’t know, that they didn’t show up to the Clash.” He continued to ponder on the thought of there not being as many race fans in Southern California as there were in the Midwest to show up to these races. The street course was a giant success for the second year in a row in 2024 and Harvick believes that it will be more so in the future.
The Chicago City Street Race is also yet to put on a completely dry race unaffected by inclement weather which could further boost its appeal amongst the fraternity. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen which drivers out of the field can bully their way into the playoffs as the final two races of the regular season go live in the next two weekends’ time.
