Ad Disclosure
NASCAR Wants to Have a Race Inside Franklin Field in Philadelphia
By Kyle Pagan
Published:
NASCAR will be up in Pocono this weekend at the Tricky Triangle. Pocono is awesome if you’ve never been. I grew up going there to watch Jeff Gordon, Bobby Labonte, Mark Martin, Kurt Busch, Matt Kenseth, Dick Trickle, Sterling Marlin, Dale Jarrett (I can keep going). Some weekends we’d go the Grandview Speedway and watch cars raace around the dirt tracks with the saddest safety netting you’ve ever seen to protect us. I’m pretty sure I was named after Kyle Petty. Wait, was I white trash? Anyway, if you and your boys are looking to do something Pocono is only 90 minutes away and the tickets are cheap. The best part is you’re allowed to bring coolers of beer to the race. What’s better than that? No breaking the bank paying for a $20 beer like you will be all weekend at CBP. The good news is you might not have to travel far for the next NASCAR race in the area if it’s up to them because they want to bring a race to Franklin Field via Matt Connolly at PennLive.com:
O’Donnell spoke with the Associated Press Sports Editors organization earlier this week in New York and revealed that Franklin Field is a venue being considered to host a NASCAR race down the line.
“When you look at opportunities, one of the places we looked around with the Coliseum was in Philly, Franklin Field. It was one of the only ones that we could put a race track inside of because of the Olympic size track,” O’Donnell said. “Those are the types of things in a city we’re going to look at because the days of just building a rural track are over.”
According to O’Donnell, NASCAR has a passionate group of fans in the Northeast. If NASCAR does indeed hold a race in Philadelphia, he has no doubt that fans would get behind it.
“If you look at Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and you look at short track racing, there’s a huge, hardcore short track market with a lot of local fans who love racing in general,” O’Donnell said.
This would be awesome! Not the race, that would be a tough watch. You think the Penn Relays are a tough to get excited about? Try watching a bunch of souped up 750 horsepower muscle machines going 50 mph for 150 laps.
This is what it looked like at Memorial Coliseum last year and it wasn’t exactly the peak of excitement:
Listen I’m not going to knock NASCAR for trying to stay creative in a competitive arena for eyeballs, but there are so many better places in Philly they could do a track. Ben Franklin Parkway would be absolutely sick if they incorporated City Hall, Logan Square and Eakins Oval. Just look at the Chicago Street Race and tell me you wouldn’t love to see that here:
F1 is huge right now. Why? Because they’re in major cities. It’s cool, the drivers are all young and rich, and they incorporate the city into every race in Miami, Las Vegas, and Austin. They’re able to do that because most of the courses they’ve raced on for decades have sharp turns and chicanes similar to cities. That’s not really the case in NASCAR, but they could throw a little bit of a wrinkle in these things to make them more interesting and I think the Parkway is perfect. Straightaways and turns on a cool course with a cool background drop. We might have a couple crashes around City Hall, but what’s different from any other day when a bunch of Jersey drivers infiltrate the city. So if NASCAR is actually serious about coming to Philly screw Franklin Field have the cars in the streets of Philadelphia and leave the potholes so it’s authentic!
Kyle writes blog posts and does Man on the Street-style videos all around Philadelphia. He graduated from Temple University (a basketball school) in 2015. contact: k.pagan@sportradar.com