NASCAR to Start Its Engines Along an Unlikely Course: Downtown Chicago
There is also a chance that the street race is a one-off.
Ms. Lightfoot, who brought the race to the city, lost her bid for re-election this year and left office in May. Her successor and fellow Democrat, Mayor Brandon Johnson, has been polite but circumspect about NASCAR, though he attended a pre-race event this week. He had little choice about proceeding with this year’s race, but after the checkered flag waves, he could seek to pull the city out of the rest of the contract.
“Will this idea lead to the expansion of how we think about what can be offered in a major city?” Mr. Johnson said in an interview shortly before his inauguration. “And if it has the ability to spark our imagination and create real opportunities for the people of Chicago, it becomes a baseline of whether or not we move forward with it.”
In other words, this weekend is a test.
“If they pull this off the first year and some of the naysayers and critics have to say, ‘Well, it turned out to not be so bad after all,’ then that’s going to pay off” for NASCAR, said Brian Hopkins, a Chicago City Council member who said he thought the economic benefits of the race had been overblown. “If, on the other hand, it goes badly, I think there will be pressure on the new mayor to cancel this deal.”
Source: The New York Times
