NASCAR Cup Series and NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series teams will help usher in Chicagoland Speedway’s rebirth this week with a Goodyear tire test.
The sessions are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday at the 1.5-mile track in Joliet, Illinois, where NASCAR’s national series last raced in 2019. The facility will welcome back both circuits, plus the ARCA Menards Series, for a July 3-5 race weekend.
Advertisement
RELATED: Cup Series schedule | Buy Chicagoland tickets
Cup Series teams will participate on both days of the test, while O’Reilly Series teams will be a part of test runs on Tuesday only. Cup Series teams scheduled to participate are:
-
No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet; driver Kyle Larson
-
No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota; driver Denny Hamlin
-
No. 12 Team Penske Ford; driver Ryan Blaney
Participating O’Reilly Series teams:
-
No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet; driver Justin Allgaier
-
No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota; driver Brandon Jones
Drivers scheduled for the two-day session said plenty of uncertainty surrounds Chicagoland, which has been mostly dormant for almost seven years.
“Yeah, it’s been a while,” said Kyle Larson, who has four top-five finishes in six career starts there. “Chicagoland was an awesome track back then, and I feel like it’s going to be a lot of fun with this car. I think this car produces a little bit more exciting racing on the intermediate-style tracks. I’m just curious to get there, see what condition the facility is in at this point, the racing surface and how it’s changed in the last six years or whatever it’s been. So, yeah, I think our whole team is excited about this test. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to learn there that could benefit us at other race tracks also throughout the year. So, yeah, it’s going to be a good test with a good benchmark of teams going there. … But those are the teams that you look at each week, so to go there and have two days to kind of learn what you can about your car, but also you’ll see how you stack up against them. They’re probably going to bring their best stuff as well, so it’ll be good.”
Advertisement
The three Cup Series teams chosen are all among the circuit’s top contenders, and each driver is a veteran with 300-plus starts. Only Hamlin is a former Chicagoland winner, having prevailed there in 2015, and he said he was split on whether the test session would provide his No. 11 team with an edge.
“I mean, maybe. Maybe a third of the field hasn’t seen it,” Hamlin said. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s an advantage. The advantage comes from having the track time. That’s ultimately where the advantage comes from. Now, that surface hasn’t seen racing in quite some time. So, what we have to do is temper our expectations of what happens out there on the test, we’re going to be going out there probably blowing dust off the thing for a few days. When we go back for the race weekend, I think that track will be totally different. But the good news is we got some good comps, which is the guys that are going be running there for the other manufacturers are guys that I would suspect we’re going to have to race, but there is some sort of advantage knowing that I have run well there, have won there and know what a car needs to feel like at that track. I have no idea what kind of condition it’s in till we get there.”
Allgaier is a two-time winner at Chicagoland in his home state of Illinois. The former O’Reilly Auto Parts Series champion visited Victory Lane there in 2011 and 2017, but said he’s considering the track’s unknowns before forming a fully developed opinion on its return.
“I’m probably excited because I just know what the runway looks like for it. I know how cool it could be, but I think there’s also some hesitation,” Allgaier said Friday at Kansas Speedway. “I mean, it’s what, seven years since anybody’s been on it, as far as NASCAR goes. I know that they’ve had some of the (driving) school cars on there and different things, but there’s always reservations whenever you don’t know what to expect. That place has always had a little bit of character of its own, and it’s always been a little bit different. So, my hope is that we fire off for our test and everything goes well. But I just think, look, the Chicago Street Race was great. It was cool. We accomplished a lot by doing it, but I just feel like getting back to Joliet, getting back to Chicagoland, I think with the Next Gen car, I’m excited because I think that the Cup race is going to be fantastic there. I think it hits every marker of what you would want for the Cup Series, but I also felt like the O’Reilly and the Truck Series races were always great there.”
Read the full article here
