In Defense of Road America and Chicagoland: What NASCAR Gets Wrong About the Upper Midwest
This summer alone, the Upper Midwest delivered two of the biggest crowds American motorsports has seen in years, and neither happened at the venue NASCAR is betting its downtown-market strategy on.
The Numbers Don't Lie
On June 21, Road America pulled over 80,000 fans to the XPEL Grand Prix, one of INDYCAR's largest non-Indy 500 television audiences in over a decade, at a track NASCAR itself walked away from after 2022. Two weeks later, on July 5, Chicagoland Speedway returned after seven dark years and sold out completely – just over 47,000 fans, its sixth capacity crowd in the last seven Cup races run anywhere in the country. It was a genuine comeback story, and NASCAR treated it as one, with executives already floating the idea of running both Chicagoland and the Chicago Street Race in 2027.
Set the two side by side and NASCAR's flagship comeback still comes in at barely half of what a road course NASCAR abandoned pulled in three weeks earlier, for a series that isn't even NASCAR's own. And just up the road, IndyCar's 2024 return to the Milwaukee Mile blew past its own attendance projections by roughly 40%, pulling in over 42,000 fans against an early target of 30,000. Iowa Speedway, by contrast – NASCAR and IndyCar's other short-track option in the region – has been drawing crowds around 6,000 and got cut from IndyCar's 2026 schedule entirely.
Three data points, three different organizers, one consistent signal: this region's appetite for racing is outrunning what anyone is planning for. And NASCAR's own flagship comeback story is still the smallest number on the board.
A Region NASCAR Mostly Left
It's worth being precise about how thin NASCAR's actual Midwest footprint is. Road America hasn't hosted a Cup or Xfinity race since 2022. The Milwaukee Mile – the oldest operating motor speedway in the world – never hosted a Cup Series race in its entire history, despite over a century of racing that included legends from Barney Oldfield to Dick Trickle. Its last Xfinity and Truck Series races were run in 2009 and 2024. Iowa Speedway, by contrast, sits in Newton, a town of about 15,000 with no comparable regional density nearby. Even with a Cup race, it represents a fundamentally different market than either Wisconsin venue.
Compare that to what the region actually supports. Road America sits inside the Fox River Valley corridor: Fond du Lac, Sheboygan, Appleton, and Green Bay are all within roughly 20 to 45 minutes, giving a "rural" road course a string of feeder cities most tracks never get. The Milwaukee Mile sits about six miles from downtown Milwaukee, inside Wisconsin State Fair Park and a few minutes from the Milwaukee County Zoo and American Family Field – genuinely urban-core proximity, closer to its namesake city than Chicagoland is to Chicago. Iowa Speedway, by contrast, sits in Newton, a town of about 15,000 with no comparable regional density nearby, likely the real reason it draws a fraction of what Wisconsin's tracks pull, and why Indycar cutting it rather than Milwaukee was the right call.
The lesson NASCAR hasn't absorbed yet: this region has two genuinely different, high-performing site profiles – a metro-core option and a regional-corridor option – and it currently has a Cup presence at neither.
What Chicagoland's Sellout Actually Proves
The sellout wasn't even the most telling number from the weekend. Fans were still working through parking well after the 5 p.m. green flag – people who already had tickets in hand, still trying to physically get into the building at the last possible minute. That's not soft demand. A sellout tells you tickets moved in advance; a parking backlog at green flag tells you the venue itself couldn't process the crowd it drew. Whatever the sellout number says, it's the floor of actual demand, not the ceiling.
The Street Race Problem
If Chicagoland is underperforming relative to the region's ceiling, NASCAR's other big regional swing, the Chicago Street Race, has struggled with something more basic: it's priced and scheduled against its own audience.
Two-day general admission ran $269 before fees in 2024, and NASCAR cut it to $150 for 2025 along with roughly 50% reductions on premium seating, the kind of two-year price collapse that only happens when an event has priced out the crowd it's chasing. Add a downtown hotel (two miles from the course still ran roughly $700 for two nights with adjoining rooms for a family needing separate sleeping space), food and drink at city-event markup with zero outside food or drink permitted, and parking, and a family weekend at the street race comfortably clears $1,000, before anyone's bought a t-shirt.
Road America, by contrast, runs a family through an entire weekend – camping, tickets, and a piece of merch per kid – for around $700. Parking is free. Kids get in free. You can bring your own cooler. The math isn't close, and it isn't explained by distance either: the drive from southern Wisconsin to Road America and the drive to downtown Chicago cost roughly the same in gas. The entire cost gap lives in what happens after you arrive: a permanent, family-owned 640-acre facility pricing its own grounds sustainably, versus a temporary circuit built inside a rented public park, competing for downtown hotel inventory against every other summer visitor to the city.
And NASCAR scheduled its downtown flagship for July 5-6 – the exact weekend a huge share of the Chicago region traditionally leaves the city entirely, heading north into Wisconsin to the Dells, Door County, and the Northwoods. The street race isn't just expensive relative to Road America. It's actively competing against the very travel pattern that would otherwise be delivering those same families to a Wisconsin racetrack.
If the goal behind the street race was reaching a younger, more price-sensitive audience, the target demographic is precisely the group with the least room to absorb these costs – saddled with the highest housing and living costs of any working generation, with none of the accumulated cushion an older fan base might have. Pricing that audience out of the sport while claiming to chase it isn't just unfair. It's a strategy that undermines its own stated purpose: fandom is built on repetition and access, not a single expensive weekend downtown.
What NASCAR Should Actually Do
Road America already proves a Wisconsin road-course date works at scale, with no NASCAR investment required to prove it – the track and IndyCar are doing that work for free. A Milwaukee Mile date built around the Wisconsin State Fair would plug into existing crowd infrastructure, transit, and civic activation that a temporary street circuit spends millions manufacturing from nothing every year, at a location genuinely closer to its host city's downtown than Chicagoland is to Chicago's. IndyCar has already spent roughly $10 million proving the Mile is viable and extended its own contract there rather than walking away, the way it did at Iowa.
NASCAR's calendar math is real: a 36-race ceiling with Chicagoland, the street race, and Coronado already competing for the same finite slots makes adding a fourth Midwest date a genuine scheduling problem. But it's a scheduling problem, not a demand problem. The region has already answered the question NASCAR keeps treating as unresolved. Wisconsin isn't a market that might work if NASCAR is patient. It's a market that's already outperforming NASCAR's best current Midwest data point, twice over, without NASCAR's help.
None of this is an argument against Chicagoland. The sellout was real, and the track deserves its place on the schedule. The question is whether the Chicago Street Race remains the premier NASCAR event for the Upper Midwest. The evidence increasingly suggests it isn't. If NASCAR wants two weekends in the region, Chicagoland has already proven itself. Road America has done the same. One offers a traditional intermediate oval with a proven Cup audience. The other offers one of the country's premier road courses, draws crowds that rival any event outside the Indianapolis 500, and delivers a family-friendly weekend at a fraction of the cost of a downtown street circuit. Those aren't competing products. They're complementary ones.
