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NASCAR COO Steve O’Donnell is not commenting on whether 2025 will be the last year of the Chicago street race, or whether the series will eventually compete in Saudi Arabia, but he does maintain that domestic and foreign interest in the sport is significant.
Next year will mark the final year of NASCAR’s original three-year deal with the city of Chicago to hold the street race. Asked about a possible extension, O’Donnell said: “For us, we’re just looking at 2025. It’ll be the third year of a three-year run and each year we’ve wanted to build upon the momentum that we have. We’ve learned things each and every year — it’s our first street race, a lot of learnings came from that. A lot of weather challenges as well. … We’ve made some tweaks to the event format and continuing to evolve that as well, so we’ll get through the event, see where things are, but concentrating on 2025 and making that event as successful as it can be.”
President Steve Phelps has said NASCAR has not been able to make a profit on the street race, which it spent $50M on the first year in 2023 and a likely smaller but still outsized amount in 2024. But he has credited the race with helping cement interest from the likes of Warner Bros. Discovery and Prime Video for new media rights agreements. O’Donnell said NASCAR is not naïve to the cost of street racing, but said NASCAR and the France family remain interested in the concept. “If it’s the right thing to do to grow the sport, I think NASCAR and the France family have shown that they’re going to invest,” he said.
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SAUDI SAUNTER: NASCAR was also listed in October as an entity that Saudi Arabia’s planned Qiddiya entertainment mega city is talking to about bringing a race to the Speed Park circuit that’s being built there to open in 2028. NASCAR next year will compete in Mexico City in an event that will mark the Cup Series’ first points race outside the U.S. in 67 years, part of its growing international presence. Asked about that, O’Donnell said, “I wouldn’t put it specifically on Saudi,” adding the sport has received interest around the globe including Europe and Asia. O’Donnell: “We’ve got a finite amount of content we can bring but I think as you look at NASCAR from an international standpoint, it’ll be more around that Mexico model where we want to look to grow the overall sport and build it within the culture wherever we go. So we can certainly take a race from an exhibition standpoint or from a national series but you’ll see it coupled if we do go somewhere with a grassroots efforts as well.”
