NASCAR Drivers Give Their Thoughts On Whether The Chicago Street Race Should Return
Whether the Chicago Street Race (the Loop 110 Xfinity race and Grant Park 165 Cup race) returns in 2026 is up in the air. The three-year contract has two option years, and it's not yet decided if those will be exercised.
If you ask NASCAR Cup drivers, though, you'll find that the consensus is that the race should remain right where it was the last three years -- downtown Chicago.
None of the pro-Chicago chatter seemed to merely be polite phrase of that week's hosts. Not only do drivers rarely hide disdain for a track, but everything I heard sounded sincere.
It's worth noting that these sentiments were expressed on Saturday, the day before the Cup race.
Count Denny Hamlin as one in the "stay" camp. Hamlin said that Chicagoland Speedway, an hour away in Joliet, is not a substitute for the Chicago Street Race, and he would like to run both. He said fans in the hotel were talking about the race and he also believed it had a positive economic impact. He even suggested possibly cutting the course in half for an oval-like layout.
"You almost would have an Indy-type oval," he said. "All you need is acceleration, heavy braking points, and turns."
Last year's winner Alex Bowman was unsurprisingly looking forward to the race.
"This is a super-fun event," Bowman said. "Always look forward to it, just from the stand point that it's so different from what we normally do."
Bowman also said Chicagoland would be challenging with the next-gen cars with how rough it is, and that street racing is a lot fun.
Perhaps the most surprising comments came from Kyle Larson. Larson, one of the top drivers on the circuit, said it was his favorite event.
"Name a better one," he said when media pressed him. "Can you?"
For Larson, the pluses include proximity to restaurants, the scenic cityscape, and staying in a nearby hotel instead of a motorhome in a track's infield. Oh, and the racing has been good.
"I think it [worked]," Ryan Blaney said of the street-racing concept. "It proved that being bold can have its benefits."
"It's been super cool to integrate ourselves into a city like Chicago," Austin Cindric said.
Drivers were also asked about alternatives, should Chicago and NASCAR decide not to return to the city's downtown next year. Chicagoland was mentioned as a not-so-bad alternative, with the acknowledgement that the speedway is yet another intermediate-length oval. Brad Keselowski joked that he'd love to see a race in Detroit, since he's a Michigan native.
As for the on-track action, Blaney told me that going into the third year at Chicago, there was much more comfort for the drivers. Larson told me that drivers would need to be conservative early before finding the limit. That's the approach eventual winner Shane Van Gisbergen took.
Cindric told me that the previous year's rain had given him data points he could use in the race. He would finish 27th after a broken toe link took him out of contention.
If NASCAR needs data points while deciding to return to Chicago, it sure seems like most of its drivers are in the plus column.
[Images © 2025 Tim Healey/TTAC.com]
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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I would never pay attention to anything that Denny Dumbazz says. He's made a career out of wrecking others to win races.
Go back to the moonshiner roots. Find a series of dirt roads down south and hold a race there. Bonus points if you run modified police interceptors to chase down the racers. Points lost for each PIT maneuver the cops inflict on you.