SAN DIEGO – The only street race here not against the law — the Anduril 250 — is causing so much gridlock on the Coronado Bridge that the weekend is already an unadulterated success.
Twenty-four hours before the green flag initiated NASCAR’s first race at a naval base, the crowd metrics were in: The roughly 50,000 seats are sold out, 67% of the ticket buyers have never attended a NASCAR event and attendees will come from 50 states and 17 countries.
It all validates the whimsical meetings held in NASCAR’s Daytona and Charlotte offices and almost certainly means, in future years, more city streets across the U.S. (and maybe in Europe or South America) will be re-imagined into makeshift race courses.
On Saturday -- after taking a high-speed spin himself in a Next Gen car on this 3.4 mile, 16-turn course at Naval Air Station North Island -- NASCAR COO Ben Kennedy confirmed that street races are a business novelty not likely to go away soon.
“I would say in general, events like this they’re important for a lot of new fans that come into this sport,” Kennedy told SBJ. “They bring in more partners. I was talking with a team representative earlier ... and they say outside Daytona 500, the Chicago and San Diego street races sell quicker than anything else that they see on the schedule.
“And I think, ultimately, a little bit of it is changing the perception of who NASCAR is. You know, we’re for everyone. We’re a bad ass sport.”
While Kennedy said no street races have been officially greenlit for 2027 -- while admitting his team is already ideating out to 2030 -- he intimated returns to Chicago and San Diego are possible, if not preferable.
“I hope so,” he said. “It’d be great. It’s a one-year commitment. So we’re focused on this weekend, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot of conversations after we come out of San Diego with the Navy and with the military to talk about: ‘Is there a second year? Is there a future here? And if so, what does that look like?’”
If future street races look anything like this weekend -- 40% of the fans from out-of-state, 40% of the fans female (when it’s usually 29%) and three-times more Hispanic attendees than normal -- they’re a no-brainer going forward.
Kennedy, in bi-weekly skull sessions with his staff, has in fact already asked for more out-of-the-box (or out in the street) ideas. “That’s what I keep asking my team,” he said. “I’m like, ‘What are you going to bring to us next? We gotta see where the bar goes from here.”
The brainstorms have been borderline mind-boggling, with Kennedy’s staffers searching Google Maps for dream scenarios and with Kennedy saying “The possibilities are really as far as your imagination goes until someone tells you ‘no.’”
One of those “no’s” -- although it would likely draw fans from the moon -- was a street race in the heart of New York City. “We’ve talked about Central Park before,” Kennedy said. “Central Park would be epic.”
The other places tossed out there -- farfetched, at least for the time being -- were San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and, according to Kennedy, “concepts like South Beach [Miami], Seattle, Denver… I mean there’s just so many iconic areas around the country and I think if you think about it with a wide-open lens, really anything is possible, like I said, until you get shot down and said ‘no’ to."
Golden Gate Bridge? “Yeah we talked about Golden Gate Bridge,” he said. “We thought that would be really cool. You’d go across the bridge. But couldn’t really come up with a course that made sense, though. And we know closing down that road would be a large lift.”
The point is, Chicago’s street race and now San Diego’s base race has resonated to the point that any road is a potential race, including abroad.
“We had a race in Mexico for the first time,” Kennedy said. “We’ve had aspirations of going north of the border at some point. There’s such a strong automotive community that’s outside the United States, whether it’s in Brazil or in Europe. I think for us, and this is longer term, we would love to find opportunities to bring racing abroad.
“…You think about the Monocos of the world, those are iconic events. And we wanted to create our own version of that that’s authentic to us."
The proof is in the partners here in San Diego. The fanfest areas on the Naval base here were loaded with activations from companies such as Red Bull (which, according to Kennedy, returned to NASCAR for the first time in 15 years) and Anduril, the defense contractor that is the main sponsor of Sunday’s race.
Anduril, for instance, is famous for making “Fury” drones that shadow fighter jets. And one of the drones was painted at the track Sunday to look like a Hendrick race car. Right next to a military robot.
“We’ve talked about this a lot in the hallway at NASCAR, and I have no idea how we quantify it,” Kennedy said. “But it’s just the novelty and uniqueness of [street races like this]. The earned media, you call it whatever you want, the swag effect. But the fact that you’re doing something on a military base, you’re building a track inside of a hundred-year-old stadium, you’re having your first ever street races in the sports’ 75-year history. There’s so many new things that we have never done before.
“Just the newness. It creates a lot of attention for your sport, and it’s a great way to create a huge splash in mainstream media that we wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to have.”
Imagine Central Park.
