Tennessee is home to many a nationally popular attraction. Not only is the city famous for its Broadway strip, otherwise known to some as the bachelorette capital of the South, but another sport is quietly moving its way in.
The Tennessee Titans have been relevant for a number of years in the NFL, the NHL wouldn’t be the same without Nashville Predators fans and NBA fans are clamoring to have a team located in the Volunteer State’s capital.
NASCAR, though, might be the city’s quickest adopter out of all the aforementioned attractions, and it’s come from the top down.
NASCAR moved its end of the season awards banquet to Nashville in 2019 and has kept it there ever since. One of the sport’s up-and-coming teams, Trackhouse Racing, has embraced Nashville as its own despite still having a shop in North Carolina.
When NASCAR comes to town, Nashville always rolls out the red carpet for the full weekend, starting with the Thursday night race at Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway: the inaugural Battle of Broadway 150. NASCAR Cup Series drivers Ross Chastain and Josh Berry, along with Tommy Joe Martins, competed in that race, which now brings more and more fans out to the historic track.
The jewel in the cowboy hat-shaped crown, though, has been the return of the yearly race at Nashville Superspeedway, which will take place again this week.
Why all the buzz around Nashville, then? All it takes is a map.
Most NASCAR fans are settled on the coasts, simply due to the sheer dispersion of people in general. However, the South provides an astronomic boost to NASCAR’s viewing numbers as well. What major city is as close as can be to the middle of the South? Nashville.
Within reasonable driving distance from anywhere within the Mississippi-Alabama-Tennessee tri-state area, Nashville provides a perfect cradle for the sport to spread its wings in its new era. More than 100,000 fans turned out for last year’s race, and a similar turnout is expected this year.
With Nashville becoming a new hub for the sport, it begs several questions about what exactly NASCAR could bring to the city and its surrounding areas in the future.
To begin with, the track itself is not actually in central Nashville. It’s in Lebanon, a satellite city. Several of these satellite cities exist, and all of them are some of the most rapidly growing cities in the country. Franklin, Columbia and Spring Hill are a few on such lists.
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