After a successful three-year run through the streets of downtown Nashville, it could take as many years for IndyCar to race through the heart of the Music City again.
IndyCar announced Wednesday morning that its Sept. 15, 2024 season finale would be relocated to Nashville Superspeedway because of construction from the Titans’ new stadium and other projects. The fourth edition of the Music City Grand Prix had been slated for a new layout that would feature Nashville’s famous nightlife on Broadway.
But now it’s unclear when IndyCar will race in the streets of Nashville again.
“The Titans’ stadium takes precedence for the city,” said Scott Borchetta, the founder of title sponsor Big Machine Label Group who also oversees operations for the race. “It just does. I don’t see that we can properly race downtown until that stadium is completed.”
Barring any delays, the Tennessee Titans are slated to christen the new Nissan Stadium with their 2027 season opener.
Borchetta indicated it likely will be a three-year waiting game until then for the Music City Grand Prix, which annually drew weekend crowds of more than 100,000 from 2021-23 while becoming a popular hospitality spot for team and series sponsors.
“I think we’ve just got to continue the conversations,” Borchetta said. “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.
“Regarding when we could turn back into Nashville, it’s really just going to depend on our continued conversations. There’s a lot of things that are very positive about racing in Tennessee. Our governor has been incredibly pro-racing, and we’re working on a Tennessee State Racing Commission that we hope comes to fruition. We have the support of the city. We have the support of the state. When we can get back there, we will.”
If the race is able to return to Nashville, it’s likely the Broadway layout will go unused. Borchetta said it’s likely the course would resemble its previous layout that used a small area of downtown while running mostly around the current Nissan Stadium with the Korean War Veterans Memorial Bridge over the Cumberland River connecting the two sections..
“I think the less we use of downtown, the better,” Borchetta said. “I want to make sure we touch it, but racing through it like we have proposed for this year, that’s going to continue to be challenging.
“I think when we come back downtown, a lot of the race will still happen on the (stadium) side of the river. We still use the bridge, and perhaps we use a similar layout on the (stadium) side of the river. There’s going to be a different on ramp for the bridge that’s coming, as well. It’s going to give us a lot of opportunities to really figure out a great racetrack for the future.”
Borchetta took over Music City Grand Prix operations two months ago and discovered that due diligence had been lacking on the plan that was announced last August to move the race to the season finale with the new downtown layout
“Yeah, I think that’s a somewhat fair assessment because the team had been doing it successfully on the prior track,” Borchetta said. “I don’t think they really understood how much more it was going to take to actually run through what we call ‘the Island’ downtown. So those conversations should have happened a year ago, and they didn’t, so that’s definitely part of the challenge, and it didn’t give any of the municipalities the proper time to really understand and address this.”