NASCAR expected to return to Joliet’s Chicagoland Speedway in 2026

Many details are still to be finalized, but it’s expected NASCAR will soon announce a return of its NASCAR Cup and Xfinity series to Joliet’s Chicagoland Speedway in 2026.

Likely to be a one-year arrangement, the return of the two premier American stock car series to a track the racing series owns has become possible thanks to a shuffled schedule, including the departure of the street race in Chicago’s Grant Park to a naval base in San Diego.

“It’s awesome – it’s such a cool track,” Joey Logano, a two-time winner in Xfinity Series races there, said of Chicagoland recently. “We bring everything else back these days, let’s bring that one back. That’d be cool.”

“This ain’t the last big domino to fall, I hear,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. wrote on X on Wednesday morning.

NASCAR had for months been working behind closed doors with the Navy to agree on terms for a race beginning next year at San Diego’s Coronado Naval Air Station on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. That race was announced last Wednesday, five days after NASCAR announced it would pause its participation in Grant Park, citing a need to reduce construction time and Chicago’s wish for the race not to run on Fourth of July weekend.

The group’s decision not to return to a road course race in Mexico City, which was well-received but caused logistical problems in getting to and from the U.S., opened a date on the 2026 schedule. Chicagoland could fill it.

Last week at the Brickyard 400, a NASCAR insider said the sanctioning body expected to spend about $4 million to refurbish Chicagoland, which includes massive grass parking lots outside the track, for a race weekend. That would be a bargain in comparison to the announced $50 million spent to build and take down the temporary road course in Grant Park for the inaugural running in 2023. That cost, as well as the construction and teardown time, was reduced over the next two years, but still exceeded $10 million annually, notwithstanding the rental fee NASCAR paid to Chicago for the use of the streets and the closure of Grant Park for a weekend.

Chicagoland Speedway opened in 2001 and hosted NASCAR races through 2019. The scheduled 2020 race on the 1.52-mile banked oval was shifted to Darlington, S.C., when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and then the 2021 event weekend was also scrapped.

The track also hosted IndyCar races from 2001 through 2010.

Alex Bowman was the winner of the 2019 Cup race, his first win in the series. Ironically, his most recent Cup victory was in Grant Park last year.

Originally a 75,000-seat facility, Chicagoland Speedway’s capacity was reduced to 47,000 seats by 2019, following a series of non-sellouts. The most recent competition there was a motocross race in 2023.