There’s some real momentum building around NASCAR returning to the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway, but will it matter at all?
There’s been rumblings of NASCAR returning to the Nashville Fairground ever since former Mayor John Cooper announced in 2021 that the city had signed a letter of intent with Bristol Motor Speedway to renovate the Fairgrounds Speedway, which hasn’t hosted a NASCAR Cup Series race since 1984.
Evidently, that’s still been a work in progress – or maybe even a work in limbo – all of these years later. Current Mayor Freddie O’Connell views the potential renovation as a low priority compared to other issues Music City faces, and has been hesitant to commit to restoring the Nashville Fairground Speedway due to taxpayer protection and noise complaints from the community.
However, there’s still a fanbase in Nashville, and a healthy contingent in the racing community that want NASCAR to return to the historic track.
One of those people just so happens to be Steve O’Donnell, the President of NASCAR. He recently joined the Door Bumper Clear podcast and spoke about the race track in Music City, and if it could ever host another NASCAR event. Dale Earnhardt Jr. helped bring the CARS Tour there this past weekend, and that sparked a lot of conversation around the fairground location (and resulted in NASCAR great, Kenny Wallace, telling the Nashville’s mayor to get his head out of his *ss).
When O’Donnell was asked if he had any updates, here’s what he had to say:
“Listen, it’s been a weekly dialogue, right? I know Speedway Motorsports president and CEO Marcus Smith is trying to get there. It’s an uphill battle, which I don’t understand. When you think about the noise and everything, I mean they’ve got concerts (at the adjacent Geodis Park) and all kinds of stuff, they’ve got soccer. But it’s tough right now.”
The President of NASCAR makes a good point… if you can have a soccer match or a concert without fears of noise, why couldn’t you have more races.
But O’Donnell went on to say that there’s not a simple path forward. If there was, he’d be more motivated to fight for NASCAR’s return to the spot. But it seems like every time the conversation takes a step in the right direction, something else comes up that causes NASCAR to take two steps back:
“Nashville is one of our most historic tracks; we’d love to be there. We’d love to be in both places in Nashville (including Lebanon’s Nashville Superspeedway), it’s a great market. They built the soccer stadium really right on top of the race track. It didn’t allow for a lot of movement. That was the first red flag…
Then there’s a pretty vocal group there about noise ordinances, and what you could do. There’s a lot of plans that have been put together on what we could do to offset some of that. It’s always been there. It’s been a disappointing battle.”
Without a doubt a disappointing battle for NASCAR fans in the Nashville area.
Steve O’Donnell feels for that group, and he’s hoping that the recent CARS Tour stop at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway can help push things in the right direction:
“Obviously, we’ve got a lot of hard-core fans there. I was glad to see the CARS Tour go there. It was a great crowd, which was awesome. So hopefully that builds a little more momentum and gets (Nashville stock car racing) back in the limelight, especially from the media.”
You can hear more from Steve O’Donnell in the Door Bumper Clear podcast interview below:
