Year End Awards
Year In Review — Awards: Best New Event
NASCAR Chicago street race
NBC got its best NASCAR viewership in six years for the race.getty images
It was one of the most expensive gambles in recent NASCAR history, but leadership believes their bet on the inaugural NASCAR Chicago street race paid off and will have an impact that will be felt for years.
Coming during NASCAR’s 75th anniversary season, the sanctioning body spent a whopping $50 million to set up the temporary street circuit around Grant Park and down famous streets including Michigan Avenue. The event, held on July 2, drew around 50,000 people and just under 4.8 million viewers watched the race, NBC’s best NASCAR figure since it drew 5.6 million in 2017 for a race from Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
SBJ considered events up through October. The NASCAR race had plenty of challenges with weather through the weekend, forcing a cancellation of multiple concerts, a delayed start and cutting the distance of the race from 100 laps to 75. But with a couple strokes of luck, the rain stopped about 15 minutes before organizers would have called for a postponement till Monday, and the Windy City debut ended up being perhaps the most exciting event of the 38-race season.
$50M
Cost of setting up the temporary track through downtown Chicago
In one of the biggest upsets in NASCAR history, New Zealander Shane van Gisbergen won the race in his NASCAR debut, the first driver to do so in NASCAR’s premier series in an extraordinary 60 years. He charged from 8th to first on the final restart of the race to claim a victory that eventually helped spark a full-time move to NASCAR next year.
Sponsors of the event included McDonald’s, Xfinity and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois.
While the race had some local critics, by the end of the weekend many had been won over by the scenes of the race on the NBC broadcast. The race also saw strong merchandise sales relative to other races this season; it had the highest average transaction rate for souvenirs of any event in 2023, even beating the Daytona 500.
A second edition will be held in 2024. And while NASCAR President Steve Phelps admitted in an interview at Race Industry Week that the governing body lost money on the event, he added, “that was the best money we spent because what I do know is that … people were interested in tuning in to see what was going to happen, particularly the casual fans.”
