NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell kept a close watch on Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway on April 11 when Dale Earnhardt Jr. ran in the Tootsie’s Music City Showdown late model stock car race before a capacity crowd.
The zMAX Series CARS Tour race, in which Earnhardt finished 12th and his teammate Caden Kvapil won, served as a litmus test for O’Donnell on what NASCAR’s return to Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway would be like.
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O’Donnell, who was a guest on the Door, Bumper, Clear podcast on April 14, said he wants to see NASCAR return to Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway more than ever and that the zMAX Series was proof NASCAR belongs in Nashville. However, he said the effort to get NASCAR back to Nashville is an “uphill battle.”
WHAT EARNHARDT RACE DID FOR NASHVILLE: What Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s race did for Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway
“Nashville is one of our most historic tracks; we’d love to be there,” O’Donnell said. “We’d love to be in both places in Nashville (including Nashville Superspeedway in Lebanon), it’s a great market … obviously, we’ve got a lot of hard-core fans there. I was glad to see the CARS Tour go there. It was a great crowd, which was awesome. So hopefully that builds a little more momentum and gets (Nashville stock car racing) back in the limelight, especially from the media.”
Steve O’Donnell on resistance to bringing NASCAR back to Fairgrounds
The effort to bring NASCAR back to Nashville for the first time since 1984 has faced resistance from some local residents and advocacy groups since it was first proposed in 2021 by Speedway Motorsports president and CEO Marcus Smith, who also wants to renovate the track.
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“Listen, it’s been a weekly dialogue, right?” O’Donnell said. “I know Marcus is trying to get there. It’s been an uphill battle, which I don’t understand. When you think about the noise and everything, I mean they’ve got concerts (at nearby Geodis Park) and all kinds of stuff, they’ve got soccer. But it’s tough right now.”
While Earnhardt was in town for the zMAX Series race, which he co-owns with Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton, and Justin Marks, Earnhardt said he has reached a point where he is more concerned with the track simply surviving than with NASCAR returning.
“I think that we have to make sure, regardless of what goes on, that this racetrack survives,” Earnhardt said while he was in Nashville.
Opponents of NASCAR’s return to Nashville are ‘pretty vocal’
O’Donnell said the placement of Geodis Park was the first sign that he saw that bringing NASCAR back to Nashville could be a challenge.
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“They built the soccer stadium really right on top of the race track,” he said. “It didn’t allow for a lot of movement and a lot of things going on,” O’Donnell said. “That was the first kind of red flag. Then there’s a pretty vocal group there about noise ordinances, what can you do? But there’s been a lot of plans put together around what we could do to offset some of that.”
Reach Mike Organ at 615-259-8021 or on X @MikeOrganWriter.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: What NASCAR’S president said about sport returning to Nashville Fairgrounds
