Last Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Kansas Speedway was arguably one of the best mid-track races in the sport’s history, which makes the sanctioning body’s decision to quit all the more unfortunate. similar tracks four years ago.
Denny Hamlin won the race at the 1.5-mile Kansas track in a last-lap duel with Kyle Larson. Their battle, however, was just the finishing touch to an action-packed 267-lap event. The race featured nine mishaps and 37 lead changes, a record for a 400-mile race on a 1.5-mile track, among 12 different riders.
The stats look more like a superspeedway event than a mid-track race, but this Kansas race had everything NASCAR expected when it developed the Next Gen car model for its 2022 debut. all teams to buy their parts from the same supplier, and it has aerodynamic features intended to help create races that allowed overtaking.
All of these developments showed up on Sunday at a type of track where the Next Gen car has generally excelled. Intermediate track racing has seen a boom in exciting racing while the quality of racing on other track types has suffered.
The problem now is that NASCAR cut several mid-track races from its schedule shortly before the launch of the Next Gen car. Tracks such as Chicagoland Speedway and Kentucky Speedway disappeared from the schedule altogether. Others, like Texas Motor Speedway, Michigan International Speedway and the oval Charlotte Motor Speedway, have been reduced to one points-paying race per year. And Speedway Motorsports Inc. has reconfigured Atlanta Motor Speedway into a track that produces superspeedway-style racing.
NASCAR swapped many of those events with road racing, which was inconsistent and often lackluster with the new car model. The Cup Series calendar now has six road races, including the Chicago Street Race, and seven fewer opportunities to see a race like Sunday’s in Kansas with the removal of nearly half of the intermediate track races from the schedule since 2019. .
The biggest loss following Sunday’s Kansas race is Chicagoland, given its similar characteristics. Both tracks are 1.5-mile ovals that opened in 2001 during NASCAR’s boom in popularity. Few races in the first 19 years at either facility were terribly exciting, although each had its moments.
Kansas had the 2008 fall race when Carl Edwards attempted to pass Jimmie Johnson on the final turn without lifting the gas pedal. It hit the wall and couldn’t win, but it was a precursor to Ross Chastain’s “Hail Melon” move in November at Martinsville Speedway.
Chicagoland had a fantastic finish in 2018 when Kyle Larson tried to find Kyle Busch in the final rounds. Dale Earnhardt Jr. did his famous “Slide job!” call, and the two made contact several times in the closing laps, with Busch eventually winning.
Kansas got a reconfiguration in 2012 when International Speedway Corp. added progressive corner banking, while Chicagoland still has traditional banking. Kansas corners are now angled 17-20 degrees from bottom to top. Chicagoland corners have 18 degrees of incline throughout.
Progressive banking probably helped the product in Kansas, but it’s not a prerequisite for a good intermediate track event. The 2023 Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte, for example, was still one of the best races at this 1.5-mile track, and it has traditional 24-degree banked turns.
NASCAR has shown a willingness to drastically alter its schedule since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced the sanctioning body to be more flexible. All of the changes so far have resulted in more road courses and NHL Winter Classic style events with the Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Chicago Street Race.
Still, the new car consistently produces its best races at the kinds of tracks that NASCAR has abandoned because of these schedule changes. Would it be too much to ask to give tracks such as Chicagoland another chance now that the Cup Series has a car that produced 37 lead changes, a record for a 400-mile race on a 1.5-mile track, on Sunday on a track in Kansas this is the most comparable installation in Chicagoland?
The Chicago Street Race in downtown Chicago might turn out to be a great social event, but it’s unlikely to be a good race on the narrow streets with tight turns. The unfortunate part of the equation is that a track now capable of producing a race fans will remember with the Next Gen car, like Kansas did last week, is dormant just 50 miles away in the suburbs of Chicago.