Saturday Chicago Street Race Notebook – Motorsports Tribune

By David Morgan, Associate Editor

CHICAGO – All of the preliminaries are complete, it’s time to go racing.

Kyle Larson completed a clean sweep of both practice and qualifying on Saturday in preparation for Sunday’s running of the NASCAR Chicago Street Race.

Prior to the green flag dropping on Sunday afternoon for the NASCAR Cup Series to take over the streets of the Windy City, here are some of the storylines of the weekend.

Study Time

A year after Shane van Gisbergen shocked the NASCAR world by winning the inaugural Chicago Street Course in his first start, drivers and teams come into the 2024 running of this race with much more knowledge in their arsenal to try and take down the reigning street course king.

Of course, it’s his title to come and take, but having a year to study their opponent will only make for a much more competitive race on Sunday.

“We hope that we’re closer to him, but you just don’t know,” Larson said. “So, I would imagine we would be a little bit closer. I think car setups are probably a little bit more optimized. I think drivers are gonna be more optimized. So, I think, it’d be a little bit tougher, but he’s also, I would assume gonna be better than he was last year as well.

“We’ll see. I think we all look forward to the challenge of trying to compete with a guy that’s that good and has the experience that he has. For me, I get two opportunities with that. So, I’m looking forward to that, hopefully learning throughout today. But we’ll see.

“I feel like with him, like we can, some of us can go as fast as him, but his racecraft is just way better than ours. I mean, last year, like he was making passes that I have never seen before. You know, that pass for lead, the passes into Turn 2 and making it look really easy. He sees things different than us and he’s able to execute it better than us because he’s really experienced. When you can race with a guy like that, it just elevates it, so it’s cool.”

Larson struck the first blow of the weekend, with his speed in both practice and qualifying, explaining that with the plethora of data available to the teams in the Cup Series, they have been able to do dissect last year’s race to improve on their weaknesses coming into 2024.

Thus far, it appears to be paying off.

“We’ve all studied some SMT,” Larson said. “But I didn’t spend like hours, you know, no different really than normal. I just kind of…