What's great about NASCAR in Chicago
And why we should celebrate taking risks and trying new things
It’s NASCAR Weekend in Chicago this weekend and I’m a fan. This may come as a surprise to the people that know me, since I’m not exactly found at a racetrack all that often. While going to a race may not be my favorite thing to do in the world, there’s a number of reasons I think this weekend’s event is great.
One reason I find it to be a good thing is because it’s a great example of taking risks and innovation. Kudos to NASCAR for trying new things. I’ll always be a fan of people and organizations taking risks and trying new things because that’s the only way we make progress in this world.
Do new things fail? Yes, all the time. And there will always be people around to say “I told you so”. Unfortunately, I know this a little too well, having tried multiple times to do new things and coming up short of what I thought they could be. But the important thing is not failing or coming up short, it’s trying, and learning to pick yourself up after a failure in order to try again. If you want to do anything worth doing, you have to take risks, and taking risks means being okay with failure. The good news is that most of the most valuable things in life are the things with the biggest chance of failure.
NASCAR is known for their races around circular, or more accurately, oval tracks. They have very rarely done street races, but (without knowing much of anything that goes on at NASCAR) I would guess that they have seen the success of Formula 1 racing and wanted to capture a bit of that.
If NASCAR wants to grow—and just like any business that wants to grow—they need to expand their market. The good news is they are starting from a pretty solid base of customers. NASCAR is popular in the United States, but only amongst a small set of people. However, of those that like and watch it, they really like it. As a result, they have good ground to start from. It’s a lot easier expanding from a loyal customer base than it is one that’s flimsy.
Is moving from an oval to the street all of a sudden going to create hundreds of thousands of new fans and customers? Probably not. But, the willingness to try is probably worthwhile enough. Put it this way, I’ve never heard people in Chicago talk about NASCAR as much as they have in the last year or so. Say what you want about whether that’s in a positive or negative light, but as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity.
Anyways, the expansion into street racing is a neat idea to me. It may seem obvious to try street racing, but I think it’s pretty different from your typical NASCAR race. There are different challenges, which means drivers need to change and adapt, as well as the cars themselves. You should see some of the streets they are racing on in Chicago. I’ve driven them, they’re not exactly perfectly smooth, banked oval tracks to say the least.
This also means that it could go terrible for them. The drivers might hate having to change their routines and skills enough to rebel at street racing1. Or it could wind up resulting in races that have more crashes than racing2—though my guess is this would appeal to some population that enjoys seeing the crashes and finds that entertaining.
But it could also mean it opens the sport up to a whole new set of people. And that brings me to the other reason that I like what they’re doing this weekend in Chicago, bringing different groups of people together.
Leave it to NASCAR to be one of the few things trying to bring rural and urban America together. Walking around Grant Park today I couldn’t help but think about this. It’s one of the things I love most about sports.
For all the people who knock sports for being trivial, I ask you this: is uniting people from different backgrounds, classes, locations, belief systems, etc. trivial? Yet that’s what sports do on a daily basis. I’ve yet to see many (if any) politicians or other “serious” people or social subjects do anything even close to this. In fact, most of them do the exact opposite, they divide, not unify.
The only other things that I can think of that bring people together as well as sports are other forms of entertainment, like music and comedy—both also considered “not serious” by “serious” people unless of course you’re talking about classical music—and war. And I think we can all agree that war is terrible. People yelling at each other because they like different sports teams pales in comparison to the horrible things that happen in war, it shouldn’t even be a comparison.
Will NASCAR hosting one event in Chicago actually bring rural and urban America together? Likely not in any wide-ranging or global sense but it’s at least a step in the right direction, even if it’s not the main event. Sometimes it’s the second or third order effects that make the most interesting results. I wonder if there’s a kid out there today who sees the event happening in Chicago this weekend and wonders if they could be the next great NASCAR driver, wouldn’t that be something?
So, that’s why I like what’s going on this weekend in Chicago. I know a lot of my neighbors will vehemently disagree with me on this topic—trust me, they’ve been complaining about this for at least a year. And I get it. It’s loud, it’s different, and it’s a disruption to the normal everyday.
But isn’t that also innovation?
As a sort of counterpoint to this: I have to say it’s pretty amazing to see the drivers race around the streets you drive every day. You can’t help but be amazed at their skills. I have a core fascination with watching anyone who is the best at what they do, do their work. Professional race car drivers are no exception to this.
These drivers are amazingly talented. You might not like cars, or think racing a trivial thing, but it’s hard to not appreciate the level of skill it takes to drive 100 mph into a 90 degree angle turn, breaking just enough to slow yourself down to not hit the wall, yet also be going fast enough to hit the turn at a maximize velocity at which your tires can still grip the pavement. I do NOT encourage anyone to try this outside of a track, but to say it takes some skill to do this is an understatement.
This would honestly be the most Chicago thing ever. I have yet to live in a place that drives as crazy as Chicagoans drive. In fact, here’s a story about a crash happening as they were setting up the course: https://www.cbssports.com/nascar/news/look-nascar-pit-crew-helps-fix-car-on-chicago-road-after-fender-bender-ahead-of-inaugural-street-race/
The last shot I’ll take at Chicago drivers (which I appreciate the irony saying this since I know am one now) is that I have honestly seen some of them try to drive 100mph on these same roads (though not as skillfully or in control).