FE: Victory laps

“Not a single lap went by without something interesting happening – battles for position, huge gains made by those further back, pit row pileups, slideouts. It wasn’t just good racing in a sport long-lampooned for being ‘guys who just go around in circles all day’– it was phenomenal racing by any stretch of the imagination.”

NASCAR’s weekend in Chicago was an experiment: Can a street race bring a younger, more diverse crowd to an aging series? Can a country sport succeed in a city? Will the city itself rebel? Will the weather? Will this even feel like a real race?



Ross Chastain was awed by skyscrapers.
Addressing the NASCAR press corps Friday at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Trackhouse Racing driver and recent winner of the Ally 400 said what we’d all been thinking: “It’s a little different than Nashville, that’s for sure…For me it's a bit different than Alva, Florida, too.”

He looked out the window nervously.
“You can't see the sky. It's only buildings. I see a couple trees and from my point of view right now. I'm not used to that. I'm used to wide open farm fields and two lane roads in South Florida. When I strap in, I'm probably not gonna see much of the sky. It's gonna be buildings and, and walls and fences and, and tight confines.”
Chastain, a spicy, dynamic driver and the heir to a watermelon-farming family off Florida’s Gulf Coast, was right to be anxious. His anxiety was reflected everywhere the race touched, from the drivers, to the city government, to NASCAR itself, to fans, to the people who live in Chicago and commute downtown, their day woefully disrupted. I think it’s fair to call the Chicago Street Race, which took place Saturday July 1st through Sunday July 3rd, an experiment. A big, risky experiment.

If the sport is to survive in the modern cultural consciousness, it needs to branch out, and fast.

For NASCAR, a lot was riding on this event going smoothly. The Street Race represents a bold new strategy, one that pulls from F1 courses like Monaco, capitalizing on a sport which is seeing a boom of popularity. It takes NASCAR, long considered a staple of the South (with all the cultural and political baggage wherein) and introduces it to a completely new, younger, and much more diverse audience. The diversity angle, namely the outreach toward Chicago’s Black community on the South Side was particularly emphasized by NASCAR’s community engagement events – for example, Bubba’s Block Party at the DuSable Museum of African American History. The message is clear: if the sport is to survive in the modern cultural consciousness, it needs to branch out, and fast.

If you are NASCAR and you want to get new fans on board, this is the kind of racing that will do it. By the end of the evening, the energy was infectious…

Find out what happened next:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a44430911/nascar-chicago-street-race-success-or-catastrophe


We welcome your comments.
Thank you to all our readers and to everyone who was part of NASCAR in Chicago

Akasha Lin
Akasha Garnier for #TheWishwall
Author, Brand Expert, Filmmaker
http://www.akashagarnier.com
#shinethroughthenoise
Photo: Getty Images
President of the NASCAR Chicago Street Course, Julie Giese (and one of the winners we won’t give away), celebrate in Victory Lane after winning NASCAR, The Loop Chicago Street Course. 

Explore more gems:
http://thewishwall.org/future-entrepreneurs