Nascar Seems Ready For What Could Be Another Unprecedented Season

To say the 2020 Nascar season was challenging is a mild understatement. The series, like all pro sports, and indeed much of the world, went into lockdown in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Races were postponed then cancelled.

After a few weeks however, and to the surprise of many, the sport returned, first virtually then in May back to real racing on real tracks. Nascar would go on to complete a full slate of races and become the first professional American sport to complete an entire season. Some tracks had to be skipped, while others held two races in a single week as races appeared in primetime on a weekday, something that would have never been thought possible just a few months prior. Yet, in the end Nascar completed the same number of races its schedule had originally called for, including running the final ten initially scheduled races in its Playoff format.

As if that wasn’t challenging enough, the issues of race and diversity, which exploded on a national scale, crept into the sport. Rather than ignoring it, Nascar met the issues of racial diversity head on acknowledging their own shortcomings and vowing to work towards making amends.

When the season ended in November with the crowning of a popular Cup champion, everyone in Nascar, executives, competitors, media, and even fans, could look back on one of the most unprecedented seasons in the history of the sport.

Ben Kennedy is Nascar’s vice president of racing development. He was right in the middle of it as one of the main architects who led the behind the scenes plans to get the sport back on track and keep it there.

“I think the hardest part was not being able to predict too far into the future,” Kennedy said. “We had several different scenarios solidified and then things would change again. The pandemic was changing by the minute. Once we realized there was a chance to return to racing, our main goal was to make sure we could get back to racing as soon as we could and that we were doing it as safely as possible for the entire industry.”

A big part of the return, and success of the 2020 season was the cooperation between Nascar and Speedway Motorsports Incorporated. The two entities own most of the tracks Nascar races on.

“When you look at the sport and the business of Nascar over the last 10 months, we have had just a phenomenal collaboration,” Marcus Smith the president and CEO of Speedway Motorsports said. “A like-mindedness around the goal of getting the sport back on track and getting it back on quickly.”

Indeed, that collaboration was key, not only among teams, sponsors and TV partners, but among the organizations that host the races. After all, without tracks, Nascar would have nowhere to race.

“As we started the process of rebuilding the schedule, we wanted to maintain the integrity of the regular season as much as possible and do our best to keep the Playoff schedule untouched,” Kennedy said. “It was a full collaborative effort from the industry, drivers, tracks, broadcast partners, state and local officials. I know we use the word collaborative often, but it is truly the only way we were able to complete the 2020 season.”

Now as the 2021 season nears challenges remain. The COVID 19 pandemic is still raging, in many ways is worse than when the sport shuttered early last season. Already changes have been forced upon the sport. The season opening Daytona 500 will only have limited fans, and it was recently announced that instead of the series heading to Auto Club Speedway in California for the third race of the season, it will now stay in Daytona running the road course on the following weekend. They will stay in Florida as Homestead-Miami, which had been the second track on the schedule shifted a weekend and will now host the third weekend of 2021.

Nascar can take much of what it learned from 2020 and apply it to much of this coming season. The restrictions on movement in the garage, the “bubble” that allows only those essential to racing and who have been tested, has already proved it can work.

“We’re ready for all those options,” Smith said. “I’m not really pinning my plans on one hope or another because, to be honest, I thought we would be done with corona by May of last year. Eventually I got to the point in 2020 where I stopped guessing and was just content in dealing with that challenges at hand and running as fast as we could and doing the right thing.”

As they did last season, tracks will face the same hurdles many did in 2020. Each must adhere to local guidelines when it comes to mass gatherings meaning most tracks will only have limited fans and some may not be allowed to have any at all.

“Simply put, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic,” Kennedy said. “So we still face many of the same challenges we faced in 2020, at least for the start of the season. Now, we have already gone through almost an entire season facing these challenges, so we have a playbook ready to help us navigate the twists and turns of this season. Obviously, one of our main goals is to get our partners and fans back to the track on a regular basis.”

With the slow rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations, things should start to get better as the pandemic eases. And while there is no exact timeframe many experts predict a return to normal by the second half of 2021.

“I think you’ll see business as usual,” Smith said. “And that means since the last 10 months, we’ve all learned that we can adapt even more quickly than we realized we could or that we had done before. That’s been a huge strength for this sport. We’ll continue to do that, continue to adapt and pivot when we need to and how we need to.”

Whenever, and however the return to normal happens, Nascar, Speedway Motorsports and the entire industry seems well prepared for what’s ahead and are ready to get the 2021 season underway.

“We’re ready to start one of the most anticipated seasons I can recall,” Kennedy said. “With new stars rising like Nascar Cup Series Champion Chase Elliott; Bubba Wallace’s opportunity with 23XI and a new car that’s on the horizon. I’m excited to get the 2021 season underway at Daytona International Speedway next month.”

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