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If you’ve listened to Trackside over the past couple of weeks, you’ve heard Kevin Lee throw out a theory where Nashville could become the site of the season-finale and also host the championship banquet. Last week, I also saw a tweet from sports business insider Adam Stern (@A_S12) saying “@IndyCar is in advanced talks to move its season finale and banquet to Nashville with the @MusicCityGP as soon as next year, per people familiar.”

Last Friday, Marshall Pruett of Racer.com had an article that went into greater detail, but sounded more and more like this was a distinct possibility.

On the surface, this sounds like good news – and not just for those of us that live in Nashville. That means the race would likely run in September instead of early August. While September can still be hot in Nashville, the possibility of cool snaps does exist. Cool weather in early August in Middle Tennessee is unheard of. High temps and high humidity are the norm.

It’s also more desirable to run the season-finale in either the Central or Eastern time zones for the eastern half or the country. Since the season-finale started running on the west coast, it usually doesn’t even start until after 4:00 pm EDT, and wraps up in the early evening on the east coast. That is considered a bad time slot for TV ratings, unless you live on the west coast.

It’s good for the city to get more exposure, and it’s good for IndyCar and their sponsors to host the Championship Banquet in a destination city that knows how to handle big events.

The current layout has been described as a s**tshow by Pruett and others. While us locals don’t like hearing that, there is not much evidence to argue the point. Multiple crashes, red-flags and yellow flags have marred this event in its two-year existence. There is nothing that tells me that this year will be different.

With the upcoming construction of a new stadium for the Tennessee Titans, a heavily modified layout and footprint will be needed for the Music City Grand Prix. The new stadium will be situated smack-dab in the middle of the entire paddock shared by the NTT IndyCar Series and all of the support series for the weekend. The entire portion of the track that surrounds the current stadium (Nissan Stadium) will be affected.

Supposedly a new layout has already been decided upon, but it has not gone before the City Council yet. It is believed that the new layout will still encompass the Korean Veterans Memorial Bridge that the current track utilizes for those outstanding TV shots. The Pruett article also says it is thought that the new layout will go on Lower Broadway, where many of the local tourist attractions, bars and restaurants are. If the bridge is included in the new layout, but the stadium area is avoided – how will they get back over to the west (downtown) side?

Just south of Nissan Stadium is a very unsightly scrap metal yard. It was there long before the stadium was, and was there when the whole East Nashville area was an industrial eyesore. It was only when Nissan Stadium was built in the late nineties that the area began getting cleaned up and retail businesses started popping up. In a nutshell, the land was cheap at the time.

TV crews for football games and the last two races, have been very adept at avoiding shots of the scrap yard – but believe me, it’s there. City officials have tried unsuccessfully to purchase the scrap yard, but to no avail. They won’t sell. If the same bridge is used in the new layout, cars will essentially be racing around a very unsightly scrap heap.

Race officials probably cannot get approval by the time the series shows up for this year’s Music City Grand Prix in about ten days, but I’m hopeful they will use that opportunity to show a proposed layout to the assembled media. There are a lot of questions regarding a new layout that need to be answered.

One question I have that no one is addressing is; what about the Titans? Unless IndyCar plans to end the season on Labor Day weekend, which has proven unpopular with the majority of IndyCar fans – there is always the potential for conflict with the Titans. In the NFL, teams can request to be away on certain weekends to avoid a local conflict – but those requests are not always granted.

In Charlotte, NC; the Carolina Panthers always request to be away from home on the weekend of the fall NASCAR race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Sometimes it’s granted, sometimes it’s not. Charlotte Motor Speedway is more than fifteen miles away from Bank of America Stadium in downtown Charlotte.

Lower Broadway is about two blocks from Nissan Stadium and is a major artery between the bridges to the north and south of the stadium. I cannot think of a more nightmarish situation than to have multiple streets of downtown Nashville closed off during a Titans game. And let’s not kid ourselves. Many Nashvillians have enjoyed going to the Music City Grand Prix for the past couple of years, and they will enjoy it again next weekend. But most of those same people would probably choose the Titans over IndyCar, if they were faced with such a choice.

The current layout has the paddock sitting square in the middle of the new stadium site. Where will it go? If they are moving most or all activity across the river to the downtown side, I’m unaware of any area on that side to hold the transporters, hospitality, concession area and other things that go with the logistics of an IndyCar race. I’m having a hard time seeing how this will work out, but I trust the people much smarter than I am to figure this out.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Part of this is necessitated by NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. We dealt with this in 2021, when the Music City Grand Prix was run during the Olympics, which had been pushed back a year for COVID. That accounted for a 4:30 pm local start time, that had the end of the race bumping up against darkness.

Will this be a one-year deal due to the Olympics, or does Nashville become the season-finale for the foreseeable future? It sounds like the latter. I’m hoping that the questions regarding the new layout and how to work around the Titans get answered soon. Other than a Labor Day date, I’m not sure how this will work.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on July 26, 2023 at 4:04 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.