NASCAR kicks off era of new at LA Coliseum

Firsts are huge in NASCAR.

The first Daytona 500 was a photo finish that took days to sort out. There was no slow-motion, no instant replay, no transponders or loop sensors, and even a perfectly timed photo at the start/finish line provided little help. Lee Petty was eventually declared the winner but not until after three days of close examinations.

Before the first tire test at the Brickyard, fans crowded the streets near the track as the haulers arrived, and nearly 50,000 of them ventured inside to watch. Nearly 30 years later, Rusty Wallace is still proud he beat Dale Earnhardt in completing the first lap there … even if it was an utterly meaningless lap in preparation for a race that hadn’t even been officially announced yet.

It’s crazy to think we’re actually on a race track inside the LA Coliseum

And so it was that as Ben Kennedy, NASCAR’s senior vice president of strategy and innovation, stepped into a pace car, fired it up and turned the first lap around the temporary 0.25-mile race track inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, it felt like the first lap of the rest of NASCAR’s life.

As the 2022 season opens, there’s the much-discussed Next Gen new car, a still-evolving schedule, new pit stops, even new approaches to how teams are owned and run. And it will all start with a race inside a famed stadium in (arguably) the boldest scheduling decision in a decade already overflowing with them. Even for a sport marked by constant change over the last 20 years, 2022 brings with it a sense of crossing into new territory, with the season-opening exhibition at the LA Coliseum the first steps into a brave new world.

“It’s crazy to think we’re actually on a race track inside the LA Coliseum,” Kennedy says during that first lap, his eyes darting from the passenger he’s riding with to the windshield and back. “The view and the optics of it — it’s going to be unbelievable when we have a ton of fans in here.”

Crazy, unbelievable, indeed. Four years ago, perhaps nobody would have proposed such a swing-for-the-fences idea. But starting in 2019 — coinciding with NASCAR buying International Speedway Corp., which owns 13 tracks, and taking it private — the sport made a concerted effort to pursue new ideas in its schedule. Just about anything was on the table, or so it seems, considering what changes have come.

When imagining what NASCAR might look like in the 2020s and beyond, officials asked themselves an intriguing question: Where do we want to race in the future? One of the easy answers was, “in our biggest markets.”

Los Angeles, for example, is the “No. 1 market for NASCAR fans,” Kennedy says. The sport already visits Fontana (a 50-mile drive from the Coliseum). Kennedy and others brainstormed about where else they could race — in modern nomenclature, how could they provide more content for fans?

“How do we create a new atmosphere, new environment and new experience for a lot of new fans who are coming to the track,” Kennedy says, “while at the same time keep the same traditional racing products that we have at a lot of our other tracks?”

As races the last few years on dirt at Bristol and road courses at Daytona and Charlotte showed, the new atmosphere, environment and experience can come in novel ways. That’s not to say they have to. But clearly the focus is on being innovative, and that ideas can come from anywhere and at any time. “We were actually driving by the Coliseum one day and thinking out loud: ‘How wild would it be if we actually had a race inside there?’ ” Kennedy says.

NASCAR’s design and development team determined they could build a track roughly the size of Bowman Gray Stadium, the famed bullring in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, inside the Coliseum. But it’s one thing to kick around wild ideas in a brainstorming session. It’s quite another to make them happen.

“I think it took us a while to really all wrap our heads around it,” Kennedy says. It took others a while, too. When NASCAR first contacted Coliseum officials about having an event there, “they said, ‘That’s great. Are you guys talking about an event for your partners? Or some sort of industry party?’ (We said) ‘We’re actually talking about a race.’ ”

Construction on the track started in December. Already there are questions as to whether this will be a one-and-done race or the first of many. The answer to that isn’t known yet, but one thing is clear: The trend of racing in new places will remain.

“What I do think we’ll see is continual bold changes, and us trying to continue to step outside of the box, trying to get into some of these larger markets where we have a lot of NASCAR fans or a lot of NASCAR fan growth and do it in unique and interesting ways and still put on a great racing product for fans.”

Said Austin Dillon, driver of the No. 3: “I’m hoping we get to go to more venues like that, because it’s just badass, that feeling we’re going to have when all those people are on top of us to start the race.”

RELATED: How NASCAR transformed Coliseum | Photos of Coliseum

UNPRECEDENTED CHANGE

David Wilson, president of Toyota Racing Development, called the level of change “unprecedented in the history of NASCAR,” and nobody would disagree with him.

Only the seats from last year’s car will be the same. The tires are built to a different size and affixed to the car differently, the bodies above those tires are composite and look more like the showroom version, and on and on. Even the numbers will be in a new place. “I’m excited, nervous, anxious, a lot of emotions really, you know?” Dillon says. “You just want to be fast. And you also just want the sport to be in a good place from a competition side of it.”

Hardcore fans, engineers and mechanics have dug, and are still digging, into the details about the Next Gen car: 670 horsepower and four-inch spoilers at non-superspeedway tracks, rack-and-pinion steering, independent rear suspension, a center-lock wheel replacing five lug nuts; 18-inch aluminum wheels instead of 15-inch steel.

Those specs all work toward a common goal: better racing. Whether that is achieved remains to be seen, and drivers and NASCAR officials expect the car to take time to get used to. “The next six months the learning curve is going to change drastically. What we start with, and what we think is going to be right, could change a lot,” Dillon says.

While the change in the car is unprecedented, so, too, is the collaboration between NASCAR, teams and manufacturers that made that change possible. Hendrick Motorsports welcomed drivers from other teams and even a car built by Richard Childress Racing onto their campus. “We had different drivers that came in — Kurt Busch was here, Tyler Reddick was here, our guys were here, because it’s this group effort,” says Jeff Gordon, vice chairman of Hendrick Motorsports.

It wasn’t always easy or fun. COVID-19 pushed the debut back a full season. Speaking with Racer.com, Wilson described frustration resulting in a “family therapy” session with NASCAR officials that resulted in a better approach to testing the new car.

“NASCAR couldn’t have gotten it done without the teams, and we were one of the teams that they called on,” Dillon says. “We just wanted to do our part to get everybody moving in the right direction because in the end, if we don’t succeed, we all fail as a group, as one.”

RELATED: NASCAR 101: Learn more about Next Gen car | What drivers say about Next Gen

STAR POWER

For much of the 1990s and the first two decades of this century, the sport has been dominated by a handful of owners — Rick Hendrick, Joe Gibbs, Jack Roush, Richard Childress and Roger Penske. Four of them — Hendrick, Gibbs, Roush and Penske—were also successful in other adjacent industries first. (Childress has branched out into other areas, but he started his career as a driver and team owner.)

Slowly but surely, with fits and starts, the NASCAR team ownership model has changed into one that is more eclectic, both before and after the charter model of ownership was introduced in 2016 to promote stability and long-term value for owners. The charter system guarantees 36 cars a spot in each race and thereby a portion of the purse.

For a while, deep-pocketed investors buying into teams was the new wave of ownership. The trend lately: star power.

Tony Stewart, co-owner of Stewart-Haas Racing, is the best combination of successful driver and team owner of the modern era. He became a co-owner when Gene Haas offered him a 50-percent stake to drive for and lend his name to the team. Similarly, Brad Keselowski this year steps into a driver/co-owner role at RFK Racing.

Michael Jordan, the co-owner of 23XI Racing, is the most high-profile person to ever enter the sport. He and driver Denny Hamlin bought a charter from Germain Racing and launched the team, with Bubba Wallace as the driver, for the 2021 season. Kurt Busch will drive a second car for the team in 2022.

And when Justin Marks teamed up with entertainer Pitbull under the Trackhouse Racing banner and then bought Chip Ganassi Racing … well, the sport has never seen anything quite like that. It’s rare enough that a marquee team is sold, let alone that a world-famous entertainer is part of the buying group. But what really sets Trackhouse Racing apart is its “why.” Yes, Trackhouse wants to win races and championships. But its goals are more profound than simply collecting checkered flags.

We need to make it a core, fundamental element of our team that we’re doing some good in the world.

Trackhouse is designing a STEM education initiative aimed at exposing America’s underrepresented youth to career opportunities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). NASCAR is a living, breathing, loud and hands-on curriculum platform, which Trackhouse hopes to use to reach kids who want to pursue STEM careers.

“We’re the luckiest people on earth because we get to go to a race track and put race cars on the race track,” Marks told NASCAR.com, “And I think if we’re going to have such a tremendous opportunity to do that, we need to make it a core, fundamental element of our team that we’re doing some good in the world.”

It’s fitting that Marks brings a new attitude toward ownership into a season in which so much else is new.

The track inside the Coliseum did not even exist in early December. In the modern-era, the NASCAR Cup Series has never raced on a quarter-mile track. And the Next Gen car — a complete rebuild from the tires up — has never raced. When the green flag flies at the LA Coliseum and these brand-new cars head off into a brand new Turn 1 at a brand new track, absolutely nobody knows what will happen.

That’s always true in sports and in life.

But it’s more true than ever this year.

RELATED: Trackhouse: A vision realized | Overview of Next Gen car