NASCAR Chicago Friday - A Drive in the Park
Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images
Special to MotorsportsMinutePlus
Tim Cronin
Writing from Chicago
Friday, June 30, 2023
Fifty-five years ago this August, the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balbo Drive in downtown Chicago became known the world over.
Demonstrators against the Vietnam War and a combination of Chicago police and Illinois national guard troops clashed on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in what became known as the Battle of Michigan Avenue. Hundreds were arrested, dozens were bloodied, and the smell of tear gas was prominent from that corner in front of what was then known as the Conrad Hilton Hotel all the way through the Loop and north to Lincoln Park.
”The whole world is watching" the demonstrators chanted before the batons began swinging. “The whole world is watching.”
This weekend, Michigan and Balbo has another name: Turn 7.
Turn 7. Photo by Tim Cronin
NASCAR hopes the whole world is watching again.
No stranger to fracases on and off the track, America’s premier stock-car racing organization hopes for a peaceful, if frantic and fast-paced, weekend in their first full-scale venture into racing on public streets in its 75-year history. Aside from running half of the famed Daytona Beach races on Highway A1A through 1958, plus some Winston West series races nearly a half-century ago, the venerable stock-car racing body has always stuck to closed courses, overwhelmingly ovals with a smattering of road courses.
So this is new, a 2.2-mile 11-turn circuit conceived in NASCAR’s board room, born on racing simulators, pitched to Lori Lightfoot when she was the mayor of Chicago, sprung on a surprised Chicago City Council, and deposited onto Chicago’s expansive Grant Park at the lakefront like an orphaned baby that wasn’t expected but needs to be cared for nonetheless.
Photo by Chris Gardner/Getty Images
While one “Welcome Race Fans” sign was festooned to a window on a Michigan Avenue building, the rest of downtown seems largely ambivalent to the presence of a major sports event taking place around - and on - the corner. Chicagoans traditionally complain about traffic as if they live in Los Angeles, but with the three major north-south arterial lakefront streets - Michigan Avenue, Columbia Drive and DuSable Lake Shore Drive - being used for the race, gridlock is expected from now until Sunday turns into Monday.
The course was marked by tragedy on Friday morning, when 53-year-old Duane Tabinski of Nashville suffered what NASCAR termed a “fatal medical emergency” while working on the audio system for the race near the finish line on Columbus Drive. Initial police reports suggested he may have been electrocuted, CBSSports.com reported. He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital about a mile away, where he was pronounced dead, Chicago police said.
Tabinski was one of hundreds of workers buzzing about the site on Friday. NASCAR has spent about $50 million in putting up the requisite barriers, fencing, suites, grandstands and all the other flotsam and jetsam that a motor race requires, right down to the start-finish line painted on Columbus Drive in front of Buckingham Fountain. A quartet of concerts, two after Saturday’s 55-lap Xfinity race and two before Sunday’s 100-lap Cup race, were added to the schedule to entice ticket buyers. The racing body, fronting the cost and hoping to cash in, is marketing the weekend as a festival, not just a couple of motor races.
“It’s important to the sport to try different things, to not be scared to fail.”
”It’s important to the sport to try different things, to not be scared to fail” said former Cup series champion Brad Keselowski, long a proponent of more variety in NASCAR’s schedule. “We have more (sponsor) partners attending this race. It feels more like the Daytona 500. That’s our lifeblood.”
Tickets? They’re available, at unpopular prices, unless you want to spend at least $269 for a general admission ticket with what’s expected to be a lousy view, or at least $465 for a seat in one of the grandstands to see the cars for a few seconds a lap. Oh, you want to be in the President’s Paddock Club by start-finish? Have $3,015 to spend? And how about a seat for your better half, too?
Maybe this is why clicking on the ticket website finds only a handful of sold-out areas. Maybe it’s why NASCAR, through an appearance by driver Bubba Wallace at a park on Thursday, gave away 200 general-admission tickets to kids.
Clearly, from the prices and the many suites to the press center in the Art Institute of Chicago, NASCAR is trying to shed its old country-boy image, at least for a weekend. There’s nowhere for campers. Even the drivers are staying in Michigan Avenue hotels.
NASCAR owns Chicagoland Speedway, a traditional 1.5-mile oval 49.1 miles as the pace car drives down the highway in Joliet. But it canceled its 2020 race there when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and hasn’t shown an inclination of reopening the track since. The success of this race, the first of a three-year deal - the first two years essentially guaranteed unless you read the fine print in the contract - may determine whether or not that track reopens, closes, or is knocked down.
How will the racing be? From a buzz standpoint, it may not matter, given the amount of publicity the race has garnered before a practice lap has been turned. But purists will want to see more than a jumble of cars going into one of the seven 90-degree corners and not coming out.
Jenson Button, the Formula One champion in 2009, is bolstering the 38-driver Cup lineup, and rates the track a 9 in difficulty, ahead of Monaco and Singapore, both an 8 in his book, chiefly because of the bulk of the car compared to a F1 missile.
“This is pretty crazy, right?”
”This is pretty crazy, right?” Button said, and nobody argued.
”I’ll be watching others and their racing lines (in Xfinity practice),” said Ross Chastain, last weekend’ss Cup winner in Nashville. “A fast driver will pass others. You’ll work to have position and you’ll be able to pass.
”We all have the same parts and pieces. We can choose our settings, it’s just my team’s application of them and me driving.”Xfinity driver Austin Hill said a trackwalk showed the track wider than it seemed on a simulator, but reality showed something else to key on.
”The roads are crowned for rain runoff; when you go over that crowning entering and exiting corners, you’ll be off-camber. So you’ve got to be careful touching throttle.”
Those seven sharp corners could turn into passing opportunities for smart drivers, but don’t expect a lot of deliberate passing until the second half of the race. With only 50 minutes of practice time, both the Xfinity The Loop 121 and the Cup series Grant Park 220 will be a learning experience in the early stages. And if it rains, draw a driver’s name out of a helmet.
- Tim Cronin