By David Morgan, Associate Editor
For the past three years, the NTT IndyCar Series has had a footprint in and around downtown Nashville, with the 2024 running of the Music City Grand Prix playing host to the season finale on a new course that would have brought more of the downtown city streets into play – including a stretch of Broadway.
However, those plans were turned on their head on Wednesday when race organizers and IndyCar officials announced that the race would not be held downtown, but instead outside the city in Lebanon, Tenn. at Nashville Superspeedway.
The 1.33-mile concrete oval is no stranger to hosting IndyCar Series races, with the series running at the track from 2001 to 2008. After being shuttered for many years, the track was revived in 2021 to host the NASCAR Cup Series and now adds IndyCar back to its portfolio for 2024.
With the move to Nashville Superspeedway, IndyCar will have its first finale on an oval since the 2014 season, when the season concluded at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. It also means that six of the last eight races of the season will be run on ovals, joining Iowa, Gateway, and Milwaukee.
Scott Borchetta, who founded and co-owns the Big Machine music label in Nashville, recently took over operations of the Music City Grand Prix and after consulting with series officials and officials in the City of Nashville determined that the plan to race through downtown would be untenable for this year’s season finale.
“While there was an awareness going into the ’24 race of some of the things that we would not have available to us, once we really started digging down over the last seven, eight weeks and trying to understand how we could make the new footprint work, because we would come back across the bridge, for those of you familiar with downtown, go up 1st Street, left up Broadway, left across 4th Avenue, over to Korean Veterans and then back across the bridge.
“Within that, 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 a very specific answer from the NFL in regard to a Titans home game that could be on September 15th,” Borchetta explained.
“Now, if we had started a year ago on all of this stuff, which 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…
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