Skepticism about Chicago Street Race was once widespread, but its success parted the clouds

Nearly a month before NASCAR made its first foray into downtown Chicago early last summer, the Sun-Times dispatched the most witless reporter it could summon to a race weekend across the Mississippi River from St. Louis — the Illinois 300 — to find out how the true experts were feeling about taking to the streets along our lakefront.

The drivers themselves were anything but sold on the upcoming Chicago Street Race, a two-day event that was scheduled to begin with the Xfinity Series — NASCAR’s second-tier circuit — running the Loop 121 around the 2.2-mile course on Saturday, July 1, and then conclude the next afternoon with the main event, the Cup Series’ 100-lap Grant Park 220.

NASCAR was celebrating its 75th year, but this would be the first time in the sport’s history that stock cars would barrel on and around city streets, an undertaking about which drivers were wary. Some had visited the Loop already and struggled to envision what race conditions would be like. Most had tooled around the course virtually using state-of-the-art simulators and had been left with questions about everything from tight turns to varying street surfaces that would be as uniform as a patchwork quilt.

That it all would unfold in Chicago — such a non-“NASCAR country” location, it could have been New York City or London or Mars — was almost beside the point.

“I think we’re all excited, and we’re all really nervous at the same time,” Joey Logano said at the time.

Added Alex Bowman: “I have no clue how it’s going to go. But I feel like we’re all going to crash a lot.”

A lot of crashes could be a good thing, guessed the bumbling reporter, who had never even witnessed a race. Most of us Chicago sports fans might still have all the tread on our tires when it comes to following the ins and outs of NASCAR, but anyone can appreciate a good ka-runch!

But back to all that uncertainty. Bubba Wallace, driving for the 23XI Racing team co-owned by Michael Jordan, was particularly nonplussed.

“I honestly don’t know how it’s all going to work out,” Wallace said. “I think there are a lot of us that are skeptical in the field.”

Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who had every reason to be walking on air, having won last year’s Daytona 500, put a finer point on it.

“There’s definitely an opportunity for it to be not as fun for us,” he said.

Even elder statesman Kevin Harvick, who was, at 47, the Cup Series’ oldest full-time driver, struggled with pre-race analysis. Would it be wild and crazy in the Loop, he was asked, with cars pinballing off one another on a course with narrow stretches and a whopping seven 90-degree turns? Or could it go the other way — as some were speculating it might — with drivers having such a hard time finding openings to make passes that the race would play out rather boringly?

“I learned a long time ago that you just can’t predict these things,” Harvick said. “This race could be the greatest race that you’ve ever seen, or it could be the worst one you’ve ever watched.”

That right there probably captured the whole thing, got right to the crux of the proverbial biscuit. If NASCAR had a theme for the event, it was: Hell if we know, but y’all invited us, and we’re comin’ anyway.

A couple of weeks before Chicago, Harvick — who has throttled back on racing this season, running only select events as he embarks on a career as a Fox Sports analyst — offered a voice of reason in a phone call.

“From a driving standpoint,” he said, “we all have this terrible, terrible habit of just going directly toward what could go wrong. But then we figure it out and everything is fine.”

EVERYTHING WAS FINE, as it turned out. Well, mostly so.

That goes for the action on the course and all that surrounded it. The Chicago Street Race did not go off without a hitch — far from it — but, man, was it ever something to see. And hear. And smell. And did we mention “hear”? Just listening to the racing was exhilarating. The earplugs provided for racegoers were totally for wusses — just ask any newbie who stuffed them deep in a pants pocket and completely forget about them, only to dig frantically for them minutes later, a mega-decibel headache threatening to set in.

Locally, there had been, to no surprise, much skepticism about a NASCAR event coming to our city and gumming up the works for a while — for the first of three straight years, according to a contract reached with former Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The event would push the Taste of Chicago to September, messing with a longstanding tradition. There would be weeks of street and sidewalk closures as the temporary course and grandstands — an enormous construction project — were created and installed.

A hell of a big footprint was going to come down on downtown workers and dwellers, whether they cared about the race weekend or not. The course — which will be unchanged for this year’s races July 6 and 7 — started on Columbus Drive near Buckingham Fountain. From there, it went south to Balbo Street, and from Balbo to DuSable Lake Shore Drive, and from Lake Shore to Roosevelt Road, and from Roosevelt again to Colum-bus, then back north to Balbo and onto Michigan Avenue, through East Congress Plaza Drive and finally to Jackson Boulevard and back to the start, around and around, again and again. Just imagining it made one dizzy. Actually seeing it was nearly a mind-melter. Logistically, it was a Loop takeover.

On June 30, the day before the big weekend, 53-year-old contractor Duane Tabinski died after being electrocuted while setting up for the races. Saturday’s Xfinity race got off at a snail’s pace because caution flags were flying. Then it was postponed after only 25 laps because of foul weather. (The conditions that night didn’t stop a 46-year-old man from driving his Corvette through a barrier and onto the course around 9 p.m., resulting in him being taken into police custody.) Record rainfall Sunday — the National Weather Service reported 3.35 inches, shattering the city’s previous record of 2.06 inches for July  2 — washed away any chance at a resumption of the Xfinity race, and the Cup race saw its start delayed and its finish moved up, with 25 laps lopped off the back end.

On top of all that, three of four music concerts planned for the weekend had to be canceled. No Chainsmokers on Saturday. No Charley Crockett or Miranda Lambert on Sunday. No “festival-style atmosphere,” which the Chicago Street Race team had promised to deliver. In the end, it was 75 laps on Sunday that would have to do the heavy lifting to make this foray into Chicago anything close to a success.

After New Zealander Shane van Gisbergen took the checkered flag in his first-ever Cup race — an amazing story in itself — the feedback from drivers actually was quite positive.

“It was really just an awesome event,” runner-up Justin Haley said.

If not for the monsoon, Chase Elliott said, Chicago “would have been a home run.”

“Overall, I thought it was a success,” he said. “I thought it ended up being a pretty good race.”

And as Kyle Busch put it, with his signature bluntness, “As far as being able to race on the streets, yeah, we did it. We accomplished it. We accomplished it in the wet.”

Once the race got going, even an unseasoned observer with media credentials could stand titillatingly close to a catch fence alongside the course and see that good things were happening. There was plenty of passing. Cars ran into one another here and there, but not very much. Busch was the first of many to slide — some more than once — into a tire barrier in one of the tricky-sharp turns, bringing some levity (although certainly not for the drivers) to the proceedings, especially when cars piled up behind whoever was trying to back up from the tires and get moving again. And did we mention the noise? Yeah, we did.

“I think what we learned is that the course was very competitive,” Street Race president Julie Giese said a month and a half before NASCAR’s 2024 visit.

And about that rain . . .

“All things considered,” she said, “it was still a very successful weekend.”

Here’s to a dry first weekend of July, right?

“I feel like we do have unfinished business,” Giese said.

Here are a few things that clearly belong in the “success” column: According to NASCAR, the weekend had an economic impact of more than $108 million for the local Chicago community. Impressively, more than 80% of ticket buyers were attending a NASCAR event for the first time. Also, a real biggie: The Grant Park 220 was the most-watched Cup race on NBC in six years. And the Chicago Street Race won the Event of the Year category at the 2024 Sports Business Awards hosted by the Sports Business Journal in New York, beating out finalists from the NHL Stadium Series to the World Baseball Classic to Super Bowl 57.

And then there was the silence. Just think about it: NASCAR came to Chicago, did its thing and went back wherever the hell it usually belongs, and were people here complaining about the whole undertaking after it was over? Laughing at it? Mocking it? Railing about it on sports-talk radio? Ruing its return?

No, not really. It must not have been such a bad thing at all.

THE COURSE WASN’T EASY on those navigating it. Stenhouse became the first Cup driver to have to go to a backup car, after a crash during practice. Harvick and Elliott each crashed during qualifying. The race came and Busch found the tires, as mentioned. Bowman’s crew had to go under the hood during a pit stop, a costly delay.

Eventually, it became obvious the fastest car on the track was van Gisbergen’s. A Super-cars Championship standout in Australia, van Gisbergen might have been a relative unknown in NASCAR circles, but he was a so-called “road-course ringer” — Chicago was his kind of race, even if he’d had to move from the right side of the car to the left in order to drive.

He found the course challenging, especially in the braking zones (think: those 90-degree turns) where many errors were made. The surface variations — concrete, asphalt, manhole covers, etc. — were no big deal to him.

“I’ve raced a lot of [road] races around the world that had way worse surfaces than that,” he said. “For [NASCAR’s] first-ever street race, I thought the job was just brilliant.”

He would know. A lot of us wouldn’t have the foggiest idea. But there were a bunch of things about NASCAR’s visit, especially on Sunday, that were plainly positive. Although the phrase “love letter to Chicago” is rather maudlin — it was used by Lightfoot as she looked ahead to the world’s view of the event, and by NBC as it delivered its broadcasts — there’s no question the setting was striking.

“Everyone was like, ‘Our city looked amazing on television,’ ” Giese said.

From the sidewalks outside the course grounds, there were some delightful snapshots. One repeated itself as drivers walked to work from the hotel where most of them stayed, fans not always knowing their names but still excited to see them and eager to wish them good luck.

“I found that quite cool,” van Gisbergen said, “even though I was kind of left to myself because nobody knew who I was.”

A national racing writer sent Giese a Sunday night text that made her warm over as she was starting to wrap things up downtown.

“He wrote, ‘This is the first time I walked outside and saw people laughing, dancing, just having a great time as they were leaving,’ ” Giese said. “Despite all that rain, despite the delays and everything, it was an amazing event.”

It’s a good thing that then-Bears quarterback Justin Fields gave the official “Fire your engines” command when he did. He won’t be around next time, which now is right around the bend.

The rest of us? We’re still here. We might even have a clearer picture of what we’re looking at when those engines fire in Year 2. And to all those who missed it the first time around, let Harvick have your ears.

“That’s OK,” he said. “Your position is really the reason that we’re there. Once we get you there in person, we won’t lose you.”