Earlier today, it was announced that IndyCar’s 2024 season finale would change venues from the streets of downtown Nashville to the Nashville Superspeedway oval located 20 miles outside of town.
The decision to relocate the season finale comes seven months before the event was set to take place, but six months after plans were announced to make the race the season finale on a new street course layout.
Work continued from that point to put all the pieces together, and it became ever more clear that the logistics of holding the Music City Grand Prix in the middle of downtown was not going to be feasible.
One of the biggest hurdles is the construction of a new stadium for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, which will be located on the land that has been used as IndyCar’s pit and paddock area.
Groundbreaking for the new stadium will take place on February 29, and will remove much of the available space needed to host a motorsports event.
That challenge, combined with other uncertainties about the NFL team’s schedule and local event permits, led to the lead promoter of the event Scott Borchetta to seek alternatives.
“While there was an awareness going into the ’24 race of some of the things that we would not have available to us,” explained Borchetta, “we really started digging down over the last seven, eight weeks and trying to understand how we could make the new footprint work…
“We flat don’t have all the lots that we need to house the teams. We don’t have room for team hospitality. We don’t have the type of access that I’m happy to present to downtown businesses and residents as far as a proper flow-through, deliveries, et cetera.
“It’s unfortunate, but I’ve just taken control of this really since December, and I know what I want to do to protect our brand, to protect the IndyCar brand, to make sure that the fans have a great experience. And every day it just started to become untenable to do it for this year.
“Now, if we had started a year ago on all of this stuff, when I was not in a leadership position, I was simply the sponsor at that point, some of these things could have been addressed.
“You might say, ‘Well, Scott, it’s not for eight months.’ Eight months is nothing with all the things that have to be done for a street race.
“The last thing we were doing going to do on my watch is fail, and that means fail to have an IndyCar race in Nashville when we’ve had that luxury to be able to do so.”
Nashville Superspeedway has hosted IndyCar racing in the past, although the most recent event on the 1.33-mile ovals was held in 2008.
The track has seen a revival in recent years and was well-suited to step in and host the race this fall, keeping the Music City Grand Prix alive and still technically in the Music City.
The spirit of the event is to race around the streets of downtown Nashville, however, just as it has for the past three years.
The race has been filled with incidents each of the times it has been held, and is typically described as ‘chaotic.’ But it has also come to be loved by fans of the series.
Borchetta and his team are going to work to bring the event back to downtown as soon as possible, but even with additional time to sort through the details, he is not optimistic of being able to do so within the next four years.
“Well, our joke is the crane is the state bird of Tennessee, so there’s no way to properly understand every build that’s happening,” continued Borchetta.
“When you look at the 4th Avenue corridor, all of the businesses that are affected there in construction. Yeah, the overall construction of Nashville is definitely one of the things that is going to prevent us [from racing downtown].
“Outside of Titans stadium, there are several builds happening along Broadway and within the footprint [of the proposed race course] that continue to make it more challenging.
“You know, the Titans stadium takes precedence for the city. It just does. I don’t see that we can properly race downtown until that stadium is completed.
“As of right now, they are scheduled to [play in the new stadium] in the fall of ’27. I think we’ve just got to continue the conversations. There’s nothing I can say that’s conclusive today.
“We all have a great desire to race IndyCar in Nashville. We have a great desire to return to the streets when we can, and there’s really nothing more factual that I can give you than that.”
The 2024 running of the Music City Grand Prix is scheduled to take place on September 15, and will now be the third consecutive oval race on the calendar as it closes out the IndyCar season.
