Same time, same place in 2024.
Same weather? It’s still a tad too early to tell.
But the Chicago Street Races will be back for at least the next two years, and that means two more cracks at having stock-car races on our downtown streets under the kinds of conditions NASCAR surely envisioned when entering into its agreement with the city last summer.
You know — sunshine, concerts, events running on schedule, fans being and staying entertained, ticket buyers not cursing their rotten luck. All that sort of good stuff.
But what about the race course itself? Is there anything about it that should be different next year?
A handful of drivers offered suggestions.
“The only concerning thing I saw was just the manhole covers,” Cup Series star Chase Elliott said. “I know they had welded them, but there are a couple of places where it looked like the welds — whether it be from equipment running across them — like, they need to be redone. And I think a couple of them are going to get really used up more than others, so I would look at that. Because if one of those pops up a little bit, you’re going to destroy something pretty bad.”
Xfinity Series driver Austin Hill noticed a manhole cover coming out of Turn 5 (going north on Columbus Drive from Roosevelt Road) that could be nettlesome for a car running side-by-side and out wide.
“It has a dip that kind of goes down into the track,” he said, “so I think if you hit that, you could get the car kind of out of shape pretty easily out there.”
Denny Hamlin, winner of the pole for Sunday’s Grant Park 220, is in favor of a tweak of the course setup coming out of Turn 12 (south on Columbus Drive from Jackson Drive) and into Pit Road.
“There’s huge [crash] barrels there,” Hamlin said. “With it being only a 40 mph corner, we probably don’t need those huge barrels. And you could probably take one of those concrete barriers off the entrance of Pit Road — because there are no pit stalls for the first three stalls anyway — and move those barrels back 20, 25 feet. It would allow us to go through the final corner a little bit faster so we’re not causing a huge stack-up with the cars that are pitting and the ones that are not.”
Perhaps there’s nothing that can be done to significantly alter the course’s narrowness or create runoff areas that just plain don’t exist, but Loop 121 winner Cole Custer noted the trickiness of certain sections of wall — including the spot in Turn 1 (at Columbus and Balbo Drive) where Kevin Harvick wrecked during a Saturday qualifying run.
“It was kind of like there was a double point in that wall that you can’t really see until you hit it,” Custer said, “so maybe that can be a little bit better.
“But, overall, they did such a great job of this. We were really skeptical [coming] here. Seeing the track when we showed up and driving around it, we were impressed.”
