CHICAGO — At roughly 2 p.m. on Friday afternoon on historic Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, there was a fender bender involving two passenger cars that one might attribute to the disturbance on the other side of Lake Michigan.
There was a happening at Grant Park, most notably home of the Lollapalooza music festival each August, but suddenly preparing a first of its kind NASCAR street course event this weekend. The haulers had just arrived from North Carolina, crew members dutifully pushing their cars towards a temporary race track that runs through Lake Shore Drive, Columbus Street and Michigan Avenue.
If there was ever a place for someone to run into the back of another passenger vehicle, this was it, apparently.
That’s because two rival Cup Series teams, Kaulig Racing and Legacy Motor Club, both leapt into action and began repairing the nose of the damaged Hyundai Santa Fe. The jeep in front of it suffered minor damage and the two NASCAR teams were able to get the sedan as repaired as possible enough to continue on its way.
This could only happen at an event like the Chicago Street Course race.
Really, that was the theme of the day, that the NASCAR industry was experiencing so many things during load-in day that might never happen again. It’s been well-documented what a calculated risk this weekend is, NASCAR taking a show that has only taken place within permanent venues and taking it literally inside the third largest market in the country.
Who knows? Something like this may never happen again and everyone in the sport at least took a moment on Friday to process the sights and sounds.
Xfinity Series driver, and NBC Sports pit road reporter, Parker Kligerman walked the track three times just because he kept finding reasons to want to do it again.
“Overall, this is so cool,” Kligerman told Sportsnaut. “The attitude, the mood, the vibe is really positive right now, everyone I talked to. And that’s because you just look up, in you’re in a turn, and there are skyscrapers everywhere. I mean come on.”
At this point, he pointed towards the sky to illustrate his point and then held his arms wide-open as if to embrace the scene.
“This is so cool,” he said. “It’s like a Formula 1 race, IndyCar race, but no, it’s NASCAR.”
A different kind of NASCAR race
And that’s the thing, right, that this isn’t a thing NASCAR typically does. Of course, until last year, they weren’t racing inside famous football stadiums or on dirt either. But the street course concept is one that already has a certain level of prestige attached to it. The setting evokes IndyCar Long Beach or Formula 1 Monaco and now NASCAR has Chicago.
Beyond the aesthetics, racing in a downtown setting has already created business opportunities for its teams, with owner-driver Brad Keselowski citing partnerships that wouldn’t be possible if NASCAR hadn’t tried this.
“If you look at my car and you look at the sponsor this weekend: We have Elk Grove, which is a local community here with a big manufacturing initiative, and those are opportunities that are afforded to us by being in such a unique market as we are here in Chicago,” Keselowski said. “I don’t think these are partnerships that we’d be able to land elsewhere.”
That’s not the only appeal to the 2012 Cup Series champion. This is also the only race where he doesn’t need a motorhome. Like most of the industry for this event, Keselowski has a hotel room right next door to Grant Park. There is no other race in which Keselowski can walk to the track, to dinner, or any number of amenities.
That’s been cool to him this week.
“I think the drivers normally having buses is a reflection of the fact that at most tracks, there’s really nowhere close to stay or there are not the amenities to be able to be at your best,” Keselowski said. “Here, it’s a little bit different.
“I mean, the hotel is right here. There are actual restaurants, and there are places and things you can do to take care of yourself and be prepared. I’d actually prefer this, because it’s a lot cheaper than driving our bus up and down the road each week … certainly a lot cheaper than buying the bus. But, don’t tell my wife or bus driver that part. Yeah, it actually worked out quite nice.”
Ross Chastain, who won on Sunday at Nashville Superspeedway, is an eighth-generation watermelon farmer from Florida. Even having grown up racing in the peninsula short track scene, he has experienced nothing like this in racing.
“I think we are all kind of processing this together,” Chastain said. “Whether you grew up in a city or not, it’s different when we’re coming here to put on a race. For me, it’s different because I am from Alva, Florida so I can’t do anything but embrace it.
“It’s incredible knowing that when we go to strap in tomorrow for practice and for the Xfinity race, it’s going to be here in the middle of downtown. I’m proud to be part of that history.”
Originally, when this event was first conceived, it was meant to be the NASCAR Cup Series and IMSA sports cars on the undercard — an attempt to get as many different manufacturer and actual street style cars on the track and involved.
When the logistics from the IMSA standpoint failed to materialize, NASCAR just added the second-tier Xfinity Series division instead. The teams that traditionally run up front in that division tend to be either Cup Series teams or those with a Cup Series affiliation.
And then you have Tommy Joe Martins, who co-owns Alpha Prime Racing, who admits to having no true notebook for what this is supposed to look like. With that said, he credited NASCAR for having everything planned out perfectly for Friday.
“There was a lot work done by NASCAR to get us ready for this, and they did think of a lot of stuff to make this as easy as possible,” Martins said. “The only thing, and we’re restricted with what we have to work with, is the push from the garage area to pit road.”
Teams had to push their cars about a mile from where they unloaded on Lake Shore to pit road on Columbus Street, with a stop at the inspection line in between. It was a similar dynamic for the Cup Series teams too.
“Once we’re out here, you’re kind of out here, so then we have to make sure we pulled everything out of the truck — wheels, carts, generators and pit boxes,” he said. “But really, this alley (pit road) is spectacular. We’re parked under a street light and it’s our pit road. That really cool.”
Drivers are expecting race to be chaotic
Friday was also the first opportunity teams had to walk the track, and it was a little different than their simulator files, and drivers still don’t know what to expect for Saturday.
But the general consensus is that both races are going to be chaotic.
“It’s a track that requires hard braking,” Kligerman said. “There are some long brake zones and then it gets really tight in Turns 7,8, 9 and 10. In terms of width, it’s the narrowest track NASCAR has ever raced on. It’s really tight over there.
“You have to be super disciplined. You’re going to touch the wall. You’re going to have to be smart in the apexes and be really precise. But the track is going to change a lot too. There’s still cars driving along Michigan Avenue and they have their own rubber, and leaking fluids, and that’s going to make the track unpredictable.”
Keselowski and teammate Chris Buescher said they both wrecked in the simulator a lot. Keselowski predicted a race that will look like the inaugural race on the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL in 2018 — an event that featured both big crashes and prolonged green flag runs in equal turn.
“A few people will get humbled very quickly in practice, qualifying and maybe even the start of the race,” Keselowski said. “That will settle it down, and then at the end, it’ll turn into some pretty tough racing.”
Keselowski said drivers feed off each other’s energy and that the practice and qualifying sessions will determine how each stage of the race plays out.
“If you have a very smooth practice session, expect the qualifying session to be a disaster — and vice-versa,” Keselowski said. “So, I think you’ll see that a lot here over the course of the next two days where the race flow and ebbs will have these big moments where it gets really calm, and then it ramps up really quickly.
“Then, dies down when everyone starts to see the consequences. I would expect a race with a lot of variability in it.”
All told, most everyone in the industry was excited at the prospects of doing something so radically different, especially after 74 years of largely being a pavement oval series.
“This is amazing and I feel so very fulfilled that is happening,” Kligerman said. “For years, I’ve always felt the biggest advantage we’ve had is a sport is the variable playing surface and now we’re using that advantage.
“And now, I don’t want to say it’s on purpose or whatever it was, but now the most diverse racing schedule in the world of motorsports is the NASCAR Cup Series. You will not find another series on Earth that races on dirt, short tracks, superspeedways, mile and a halfs, road courses and street courses. We have it all now and that’s really cool.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.