What NASCAR learned from three years of building a street course in Chicago

Sports

add

CHICAGO — At 10 p.m. last Thursday in downtown Chicago, at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Jackson Drive, Jeremy Casperson surveyed the scene. He was in his element as the person overseeing the build on the Chicago Street Course, a temporary circuit that two days later would host NASCAR races for a third consecutive year, on a layout he played an instrumental role in putting together.

“This is the time the track comes alive,” Casperson said, as a nearby L train rumbled through the area.

Building a racetrack in any city presents a challenge, but especially in Chicago, the third-largest city in the United States. When the league announced in the summer of 2022 that it would be racing around Grant Park, many doubted that NASCAR could pull off this unprecedented project.

Now, three years later, NASCAR has proven it can build a world-class street circuit inside a major metropolitan city.

“I think that this is certainly a well-designed street race,” said Denny Hamlin, driver for Joe Gibbs Racing and 23XI Racing co-owner. “You have some really great passing zones. That’s the most important thing. It’s one thing to try to kind of parade around the city, it’s another to actually have a race track that you can race at and pass at.”

Whether NASCAR returns next year to race on the Chicago Street Course is still to be determined, as the league and city just completed the third year of a three-year agreement with a mutual option for an additional two years. But even if NASCAR doesn’t return here in 2026, there is much for NASCAR to take away from how it built a 2.2-mile, 12-turn track in downtown Chicago, lessons that will shape similar efforts going forward.

When NASCAR first constructed the Chicago Street Course, the build time spanned 42 days. With the temporary circuit encompassing seven busy downtown roads and necessitating a multi-day shutdown, scaling back the build time each year was a primary goal, track president Julie Giese said.

This year, the total build time was reduced to 25 total days.

“What we’ve learned is just efficiencies on how we load trucks, routes we bring trucks in, the number of people we have loading blocks (for track barriers) versus unloading blocks to help speed up the process,” Casperson said. “We’re to the point where we started with kind of figuring we do 20 blocks an hour to now we’re 40 to 50 blocks an hour.”

Concrete blocks shape the outline of the Chicago Street Course. The crews were placing 40-50 blocks per hour, project lead Jeremy Casperson said. (Jordan Bianchi / The Athletic)

Whether NASCAR is back in Chicago next year or in a different city at some point, minimizing the inconvenience to the local population is critical. It was one of the major hurdles NASCAR had to overcome when pursuing a race in Chicago, and it’s why there has been such a continued emphasis on reducing the time that roads would be blocked off.

Planning and executing the build is Casperson’s responsibility. A professional civil engineer by trade, he joined NASCAR in February 2021 and has become well-versed in building temporary racetracks in places that weren’t necessarily designed for it. His hire coincided with NASCAR beginning to push the envelope on racing in non-traditional environments — first building a short track inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 2022, then a street course in Chicago.

Should NASCAR find itself racing inside a football stadium again, or back in Chicago, or on a street course elsewhere, Casperson is in charge of making it work efficiently and effectively. It’s an all-encompassing job for NASCAR’s senior director of design and development. For Chicago, he, his wife and their young children relocated to the city beginning in mid-June, living just minutes away from his office and the track itself, and they will remain in the city until Monday, one week after the race, with the full teardown completed the day prior.

Casperson and his team — consisting of track service operations staff pulled from an array of NASCAR-owned tracks and workers from companies that specialize in tasks like placing concrete barriers together or installing safety fencing — work nearly around the clock. In the previous six days, he said he slept a total of 24 hours.

“I can’t afford to sleep,” he said. “I’m dealing with non-stop fire drills.”

The 2,000 barriers that make up the track layout are stored at a site about a mile from the track, allowing for tractor-trailers to continually haul in barriers throughout the day/night. Each barrier weighs 10,000 pounds (five tons), is 42 inches high, and most are 10 feet long.

The goal each day is to install between 140-160 barriers plus safety fencing on each barrier. It’s an intricate process, like a giant Lego set with thousands of pieces.

“That’s a pretty good comparison, actually,” Casperson said. “Lego sets nowadays come with these books that are 200 pages long, and you build one piece, and you don’t know exactly what you’re building. Then, somehow, at the end, it’ll come together. And that’s exactly what happens here. You build one street at a time, and it looks disjointed and discombobulated. But on days like tonight, where we get to tie everything together, you get that satisfaction.”

With so many parts and a tight deadline to complete the build, attention to detail is crucial. In three years, there have been no serious issues with the Chicago Street Course, and most in the industry are confident that NASCAR could now replicate this elsewhere.

“The way they repeated the track and just the measurements and the corner angles and braking zones — all the things were extremely similar (from year to year). Where they had walls placed, like all that stuff was done really, really well,” Hendrick Motorsports driver Chase Elliott said. “… I think if you have street courses and things from a driver’s side, it is nice to not have massive changes on the road from year to year because it can be tough to adapt to that stuff.”

At 1 a.m. Friday morning, Casperson walked over to examine Turn 1. Due to the design, Turn 1 butts up against Turn 6, and so the barriers for both corners are almost pushed against one another — except there is enough space left between them so that one barrier doesn’t shove into the other, in case an accident occurs at this high-speed section of the track. This proved important during Sunday’s race, when Cody Ware slammed into the Turn 6 barriers after a brake rotor exploded. Race leader Shane van Gisbergen can see the smoke from Ware’s car as he approached Turn 1, but the Turn 6 barriers remained in place and didn’t create any further hazard.

Turns 1 and 6 run right up against each other, but the design helped assure that a wreck one turn wouldn’t affect cars going through the other. (Jordan Bianchi / The Athletic)

After inspecting this section, Casperson hopped into a golf cart to look at other areas. During his drive, he noticed something, turned around and stopped suddenly. Some parts of the track had incurred damage, likely from a forklift, and needed repairs. He made a note. He’d later notice a bump that had always been present in Turn 10 had worsened and needed attention.

In another section of the track, Turns 7-10, Casperson pointed toward banners that had been zip-tied twice to the fencing. This was a new approach this year. In the first two years of the race, when cars would speed through here, the wind created would get underneath the banners with such force that it would rip the zip ties off. After every on-track session, Casperson and his team would walk through and strap the banners back down, worried that a banner would eventually come off while cars were on the track, a nightmare scenario.

“I held my breath every time cars were on the track,” Casperson said. “I like to problem-solve, and this is a problem.”

From the big to the little, building the Chicago Street Course has been a case study for NASCAR in effective problem solving. And once again, Casperson and his team met their deadline. By Friday morning, everything is largely as it needed to be on the track.

They have proved they know how to construct a street course in a major city. The question now: Where will they do it next?

“You’re in a big city, one of the biggest in the U.S.,” Hamlin said. “You’ve got a very racy race track, and you’ve got a beautiful backdrop,” Hamlin said. “So those are the things that I think are very important to building a street race and, obviously, anywhere they look going forward hopefully has all the things that Chicago has brought.”

(Top photo of cars racing through E Congress Plaza Dr. in Chicago during Sunday’s Chicago Street Race: Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

Share on

email

Previous

trending_flat

Yankees dustup escalates quickly, plus: Time to worry about Dodgers?

Sports

Next

trending_flat

LeBron James and Stephen Curry could become teammates again on an unexpected team

Amazon - English