With this weekend marking the third — and potentially final — edition of NASCAR’s Chicago Street Race in downtown Chicago, conversation has already begun among racing fans that if indeed the street race soon becomes history, perhaps NASCAR should return to the Chicagoland Speedway (CLS).
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But there actually was a now long-forgotten racetrack that preceded CLS in the Windy City area, namely, Chicago Motor Speedway (CMS). Built upon a former horse racing track, CMS lasted just four short years before it went out of business due to financial issues.
Today, a massive beverage distribution warehouse and a Walmart sit where the track once was.
A one-mile flat oval, Chicago Motor Speedway was built in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Illinois at a price tag of $70 million. IndyCar team owner (and former NASCAR team owner) Chip Ganassi played a key part in building CMS.
It hosted four CART (now IndyCar) races, two NASCAR truck races, as well as races in the American Speed Association, Toyota Atlantic and a smattering of other small events.
It also opened right about the time that International Speedway Corp. (parent company of NASCAR) broke ground on what would become Chicagoland Speedway, roughly 35 miles away from Cicero.
The first race was a prelude to a short-lived existence
Chicago Motor Speedway’s first event, the CART Target Grand Prix of Chicago, was held on August 22, 1999. And the way things began, you could almost tell that CMS was doomed from the start.
Rain forced the delayed start for a couple of hours. Then, when the track was dry, it took three attempts to start the race. Juan Pablo Montoya would be the first winner, driving for Chip Ganassi Racing.
Cristiano da Matta would win two of the final three races, in 2000 for PPI Motorsports and the last event held at the track in 2002 for Newman/Haas Racing. Swedish driver Kenny Bräck won the 2001 event.
In 2000, Joe Ruttman won the NASCAR Truck Series event, while Scott Riggs won the 2001 Truck race, ending a brief courtship between the track and NASCAR.
2001 was also the year that the 1.5-mile Chicagoland Speedway oval opened to rave reviews and a sellout crowd of NASCAR fans. For the record, the first IndyCar race at CMS in 1999 was also a sellout, but attendance quickly dropped off in the next three years.
There’d be one more major race — CART in 2002 — before Chicago Motor Speedway closed its doors for the final time, one of the shortest, if not the all-time shortest, tenures of a major racetrack in the U.S.
Even though it only hosted two Truck races, Chicago Motor Speedway would go down in history as one of only three racetracks in American racing history that hosted both NASCAR/CART and horse racing, the others being Dover Motor Speedway and a now defunct track in Syracuse, New York.
What links Chicago Motor Speedway and Sylvester Stallone?
One interesting side note about CMS: even though it closed in 2003 and demolished in 2009, a number of racing scenes in the Sylvester Stallone movie “Driven” were filmed there in 2003, making that the real last racing event of sorts to be held on the defunct oval. Meanwhile, the town of Cicero purchased the facility in 2003 for $18 million and then eventually resold the land to Wirtz Beverage Group and Walmart.
As for Chicagoland Speedway, it would go on to host 19 years of Cup, Xfinity and Truck Series races before it fell off the schedule in 2020, leaving Chicago without a major Cup or Xfinity race for three years before the street race debuted in 2023.
Chicagoland Speedway remains intact and if the street race’s tenure does end after Sunday, Chicago-area race fans will hope that NASCAR will be back next year.
