NASCAR Needed Its Chicago Street Race to be a Success. Then Came the Flood.

Ross Chastain was awed by skyscrapers.

Addressing the NASCAR press corps Saturday 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.

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.

Pulling from F1 is probably a good place to start. Jenson Button, 2009 F1 champion-cum-NASCAR driver, would know better than most. “I can only think of positives,” he said in the press conference. “We're trying something new…I know from previous experiences, street races for the teams, for the drivers, it's all a big learning curve.” For Button, Chicago is just the beginning. “I want to see racing in Europe. I think the European fans are very on board with NASCAR at the moment, especially after the performance that we had at Le Mans. They're new fans and I think that's one thing about racing in the streets here.”

That’s the drivers’ side of the story. For Chicago, the situation is more complicated.

The NASCAR Street Race was a project of the outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and since its inception has been criticized by community activists and transportation advocates around the city.

“We were deeply concerned about the lack of transparency here. And transit seemed like an afterthought. Safety seemed like an afterthought,” said David Powe, who works at the Active Transportation Alliance, a transit nonprofit. “The economy and tourism should never come before human safety, air quality and the equity concerns of making sure that people using the bus can get to where they're trying to get to healthcare, get to school, get to their medical appointments, get to a grocery store. We're just deeply concerned about the previous administration's push to get this approved and scheduled.”

“Chicagoans have been calling for better access to our public parks, whether that's Riis Park or Grant Park, Millennium Park or the Lakefront Trail. And [instead] we've just been giving more and more of our public space away to corporations. This is just another one of those examples,” said Rony Islam, an organizer with Chicago Bike Grid Now!

“NASCAR talks a lot about like, oh, I'm doing community outreach, and they've got like a section of their setup that's open to the public or whatever. But it's not really open to the public and it's not open to all Chicagoans. And when you look at their ticket prices, for example, oh yeah. It's very clear that it's not open to all Chicagoans.”

Islam has a point. At $269 and up, the tickets, in fact, do not come cheap. Even for NASCAR, they’re deeply expensive, and the organization hoped that by combining the race with a kind of half music festival – acts like The Black Crows and the Chainsmokers were to perform – would justify the cost of entry. If NASCAR wants to reach out to a more diverse fanbase, $269 is a little high if you’re a college student or working a 9-to-5.

Regardless of the lack of transparency, the turning of Grant Park into a fortress, and the high costs, the event would go on regardless. The big experiment was on.

Then the flood came.

Things weren’t ideal before it started raining on Saturday. “It’s giving Fyre Festival,” I overheard a fan say waiting in line for a $10 Busch Light in the General Admission Plus zone, which gave one access to a bunch of strewn about picnic tables and bathrooms that weren’t porta potties. Lots of things were already coming apart by the time I got there during the Xfinity Cup practice round on Saturday. Many fans, including myself, assumed that a GA+ ticket included a seat in the grandstands. It did not. Those were reserved for ticket holders paying a frankly insane $465 and up, and there was nothing indicating that spectators should bring their own chairs. The sophisticated Tap to Pay bracelet system didn’t work. By 2 p.m., when the first show started, Grant Park was virtually empty. I’ve been to house shows with more people. Things began to fill up when the Xfinity race started, only for it to be called off due to lightning strikes. The City of Chicago has a 90 minute waiting period for lightning compared to NASCAR’s 30. Eventually, everyone was sent home and the Chainsmokers concert was canceled.

It got worse. Chicago has been suffering from a severe drought for months, only for the heavens to open beginning Sunday morning. Flash Flood warnings swept in around the city with explicit instructions: DO NOT LEAVE YOUR POSITION UNLESS YOU ARE SEEKING SAFER GROUND. Images from the racetrack started to pour (pun intended) in from Twitter. Tires floating in puddles. Inches of water standing on the asphalt. First the hammer came for the musical acts. Then the resumption of the Xfinity Race, leaving Cole Custer declared the winner in a rare race called before the end of "stage 2." All eyes were on the Cup Series, which entered a holding pattern at least until the rain stopped and the track could be squeegeed. In the replies to each news update were fans demanding a refund, as the musical acts and other perks were the only advantage they had over those folks crowding around balconies and peeking through the holes in fences. Cameras panned towards empty grandstands and drivers standing around in ankle-high water. It was, to put it bluntly, a disaster for NASCAR.

When the news came that they’d try to race – doing a few single-file laps under caution to give the drivers the final say – the sun emerged from the clouds. By the time I got down to the track, people had gathered in ponchos, skeptical and burned out. The grounds were one giant puddle, the sidewalks caked with mud. Honestly, I felt bad for everyone, from the drivers to the organizers to the people who gave up access to the park for this. But when the racing started happening, I noticed something. People came out. They emerged progressively as the laps ticked down. They cut holes in fences. They sat on the shoulders of fathers. They oohed and ahhed as the cars passed mere feet from where their asses were parked in lawn chairs.

As for the course, it took a while for everyone to get used to it. Kyle Busch went deep into the tires, spilling collected water everywhere, and had to get pulled out. (He wouldn’t be the only one.) Several different drivers would take helm of the lead only to meet their demise on one tight 90-degree turn or another, the road slick with water: Christopher Bell, Tyler Reddick, Austin Dillon – each looked poised to take the prize at one point before the track said otherwise. Alex Bowman’s car caught on fire 20 feet from where I was standing.

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.

The chaos produced huge upsets. Kyle Busch went from being in the tires to finishing 5th. Chase Elliot, who started 26th would, owing to a helluva lot of quick maneuvering, finish 3rd. Justin Haley, who struggled with the simulator, totaled his car in qualifying, and started the race dead last, finished in a jaw-dropping second place. But by far the biggest story was that of Kiwi Supercar driver Shane van Gisbergen, who pulled ahead of Haley in the twilight hours of the race and won, astonishingly, in his Cup Series debut, something that hadn’t happened in NASCAR since 1963. There could not have been a better winner – the whole final lap had the aura of a fairytale.

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. Everyone forgot about what a shitshow it was. This event is far from unsalvageable, despite the challenges. At the end of the day, if NASCAR has a pattern for success here – they should merely learn from what went right and what went wrong. In my opinion, all the Street Race needs to be a welcome and exciting perennial event is three things: better communication with the city and the transit agencies, more grandstands and other seating, and cheaper tickets. Open up Grant Park for $50 a pop and sell the seats for more. Forget the Chainsmokers.

As I left the track, I overheard dozens of spectators, most of whom were still buzzing from the night’s events. It’s true that many were from out of town – much was being said about catching a flight the next morning – but a lot of them were Chicagoans, discussing routes back home on the L. The one I remember most, though, was a five year old boy walking hand and hand with his mother. He asked her, “Mom, have you ever seen the Daytona 500 on TV?” His mother said she had.

“That’s so cool, mom,” the boy said. “That’s so cool.”

Kate Wagner is a journalist and critic working in Chicago and Ljubljana, Slovenia. She covers topics ranging from architecture to culture to sports. As a sports journalist she has covered two Tours de France and numerous other races in professional cycling.

You Might Also Like

• You Need a Torque Wrench in Your Toolbox

• Tested: Best Car Interior Cleaners

• The Man Who Signs Every Car