In a Hall of Fame career spanning two decades, Dale Earnhardt Jr. became a master of the oval track, amassing 26 NASCAR Cup victories, including two Daytona 500 wins.
But after a test spin Wednesday, the retired driver, now a NASCAR analyst for NBC Sports, said he has never seen anything like the Chicago Street Course.
“We want to put drivers through some of the toughest challenges we can and I think this track will do that,” said Earnhardt, 48. “There’ll be some guys that really like it. There will be some guys that find it really challenging and miserable.”
Presumably those challenges won’t include car-swallowing potholes, stray CTA buses and actual Chicago drivers when Grant Park is transformed into the first street course in NASCAR’s 75-year history.
The Grant Park 220, a nationally televised Cup Series race on July 2, will feature a 12-turn, 2.2-mile course, with top NASCAR drivers navigating closed-off streets lined with temporary fences, grandstands and hospitality suites. A separate Xfinity Series race is set for July 1.
The pop-up course will start on Columbus Drive in front of Buckingham Fountain, taking in stretches of DuSable Lake Shore Drive and South Michigan Avenue in a lap filled with sharp turns, bottlenecks and an urban backdrop far removed from the typical NASCAR track.
“My first reaction was that the track is a lot wider than I anticipated,” Earnhardt said. “But it also funnels down in some narrow spaces that will create some challenges as they contest positions getting into those areas, like who goes first. They’re going to argue over that.”
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Earnhardt said drivers should top 140 mph on straightaways such as DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Some turns will force the cars to slow down to about 40 mph, he said, while others will accommodate much higher speeds.
The fastest turn will likely be No. 2, from Balbo Drive onto DuSable Lake Shore Drive, with drivers hitting 90 to 100 mph, Earnhardt said. That assumes, of course, the traffic lights stay green.
One of the most challenging spots will be turn 7 from Balbo onto South Michigan Avenue. Much like regular rush hour traffic, Earnhardt expects something of a traffic jam.
“You cross over a bridge down a hill into turn 7 onto Michigan Avenue,” Earnhardt said. “The car is light, because it’s cresting a hill, and then they’ve got to brake and slow it down tremendously. I think that’s going to be a really interesting spot to keep an eye on.”
A NASCAR TV analyst since 2018, Earnhardt will be positioned at turns 4 and 5 during the broadcast as the race cars exit DuSable Lake Shore Drive, round Roosevelt Road and head back north on Columbus Drive.
Those turns, Earnhardt said, reveal a gritty reality of racing on the streets of Chicago.
“It’s super wide, but that asphalt is kind of old and it’s very imperfect,” he said. “The cars are going to have to kind of dance across it as they accelerate out of that corner.”
Earnhardt said the current NASCAR roster of Next Gen cars, which look more like stock vehicles, will fare well on the twists and turns of the Chicago Street Course. His last race in the Chicago area was one long left turn on a traditional track.
For much of Earnhardt’s racing career, Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet was an important part of the NASCAR schedule. The track began hosting Cup Series races when it opened in 2001, but has been idled since NASCAR acquired the 1.5-mile oval in 2019.
Earnhardt, who won the race in 2005, has many fond memories of competing in the Chicago area.
“You got to come into the city the week before, do a ton of media, go to all these restaurants you would hear about,” Earnhardt said. “I always felt like we would come back, but I didn’t think it would be like this. This is even cooler.”
