JOLIET, IL – The ol’ place looked pretty much the way it did when Ryan Blaney last pulled out through the tunnel seven years ago.
Even the quirks of the roads on his drive in came back to him, even if progress has encroached a bit in the form of warehouses and distribution centers.
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Sure, they’ve spiffed up Chicagoland Speedway a bit in preparation for the return of NASCAR to the 1.5-mile oval 45 minutes south of downtown for the Fourth of July weekend, and for the two-day Goodyear tire test to prepare for it.
The feel came back quickly too, although the intensity was turned up a click or two. Or three.
“If I hit the tunnel bump wrong, it’s a ‘yikes’ for a moment, but that’s good,” Blaney, the 2023 Cup Series champion, said on the second day of the test April 22. “That’s character in the racetrack, and drivers enjoy that.
“I was driving my rental car around it yesterday and the seams of this place are just growing,” Blaney said, spreading his fingers a couple of inches apart, “and I was like, damn, they’re bigger than I remember the seams in between the lanes, but that’s good. Racetracks where there’s more room for error is when you get good racing.
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“Like, if everyone’s locked down, running the bottom, that’s when you don’t really have good shows, and when you have places like this where the seams are really wide, there’s massive bumps in the racetrack, the room for mistakes is larger, and I think that’s what kind of competitors really enjoy, and what people enjoy is people making mistakes trying to get on the edge.”
Blaney and Penske Racing represented Ford, two-time champion Kyle Larson and Hendrick Motorsports were on site for Chevrolet, and Denny Hamlin and Joe Gibbs Racing put in the work for Toyota. Larson and Hamlin each won a race at Chicagoland, Hamlin in Cup and Larson in what was then the Nationwide Series.
O’Reilly Auto Parts series drivers Justin Allgaier and Brandon Jones participated in testing on the first day.
Denny Hamlin drivers through Turn 4 with the Joliet water tower seen in the distance during a Goodyear tire test Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Illinois.
NASCAR ran 19 Cup Series races at Chicagoland from 2001-2019, and what is now the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series raced 24 times in that span, doubling up from 2011-15.
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Races scheduled for the 2020 season were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the NASCAR-owned facility has largely been dormant since. A 2020 proposal to sell off 82 acres for warehouse storage was nixed by the Joliet Plan Commission. Meanwhile construction has continued in what was once farmland surrounding the site.
NASCAR took the Cup Series 190 miles to the north to Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, in 2021 and ’22 to join what had been a standalone weekend for the second division for 11 seasons.
Then the sanctioning body went to downtown Chicago. While NASCAR proved it could stage events on a temporary circuit – expanding its growth options exponentially and reaching an untapped fan base – it reportedly lost $55 million over the three-year contract in doing so.
More: Road America boss talks upgrades, ticket prices, Grasscrete, NASCAR and more
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Both Road America and the downtown Chicago course were generally popular with drivers, although some thought the schedule had shifted too far toward road courses from traditional NASCAR ovals such as Chicagoland. NASCAR will again run on a temporary circuit, this time around a military base in San Diego in June.
“I had an amazing time racing in the city for those few years,” said Larson, the 2021 and ’25 Cup champion. “I thought that was probably my favorite event of the year every year that we did it. So, bummer that we’re not going back, but I understand, and then it’s cool that we get to still stay in the area and come back to an oval that was amazing.
“This area has a lot of race fans. A lot of dirt racing fans, just a lot of race fans in general. I think that’s great. Whether it’s Road America or Chicagoland or the street race, this little region is good for the sport.”
As with other tracks of during that era, Chicagoland underwent two seating reductions, from about 69,000 to 55,000 in 2013 and then to about 47,000. It still came short of selling out.
NASCAR driver Ryan Blaney speaks with reporters during a break in the Goodyear tire test April 22 at Chicagoland Speedway.
The first day of the test was open to fans, and if the turnout was any indication, there’s reason to hope the track will enjoy a welcome return to the series.
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“I think that’s what NASCAR has done a really good job at, is going to these places and bringing it to the person who maybe isn’t a fan and just have never experienced it in person live,” Blaney said. “You have to bring people to racing and any motorsports live.
“It’s so much different on the appreciation side of it, and they’ll be able to see a lot more here than they could on the streets of Chicago. So I’m hoping we’ll get a lot of draw from those folks in the city who went to the street race for the first time, watched the sport and now they want to come here and support it just because they fell in love with it.”
While often lumped in with Charlotte, Texas and the other 1.5-mile intermediate tracks with a front-stretch dogleg, Chicago is more rounded, with even the back stretch curving slightly.
After a day and a half of testing, Larson said he expected Goodyear to end up with the tire it has used elsewhere or something close.
Kyle Larson drives past the main grandstand during a Goodyear tire test April 22 at Chicagoland Speedway.
“There’s no unknowns [with that tire], but the conditions are quite a bit different than what we’ll see here in July,” Larson said. “It’s gonna be 1,000 degrees outside, which would be better.
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“I think we’ll lay more rubber into the surface. We’ll be able to be off the throttle, and you make tires live longer and you’ll be able to move around the track more as the pace slows down.”
A little more than half the drivers who competed in the 2019 Cup race at Chicagoland remain regulars in the series.
Come Fourth of July weekend, we’ll see how ready the newcomers are for their “yikes” moment.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: NASCAR drivers test at Chicagoland Speedway for July 4 weekend return
Read the full article here
