Throughout the 2020s, NASCAR has shown a willingness to take big swings with new events for its marquee Cup Series. A street circuit in Chicago, a temporary dirt track over Bristol, and an exhibition race inside an Olympic stadium have all come and gone, and this year, their place on the schedule was taken up by something even wilder: a temporary track on an actual, working naval base just outside of downtown San Diego.
While last weekend’s event at Naval Base Coronado sold out on both Saturday and Sunday, the three-race weekend was marred by four red flags necessitated by track construction failures and two field-sweeping wrecks. Saturday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race was particularly messy, starting with a manhole cover flying into a car’s radiator and ending around five hours later after a mid-race wreck involving over half the field.
The on-track problems were already apparent after Friday’s Truck Series race, which itself went long after the first of three red flags to repair a wall that had moved after a crash. Speaking to Road & Track, two of Joe Gibbs Racing’s most prominent voices raised concerns about issues plaguing the temporary track.
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Chase Briscoe, a Cup Series driver for JGR, tells Road & Track that the track had “way less grip than we anticipated before coming here.” He says that the track was notably different in reality than on the sim, with real-world lap times being a massive 10 full seconds off what his team expected going into the race weekend. This was not an isolated issue, either. Another driver at another team said during the race weekend that their simulated times were eight seconds off.
“Any time you go to a new track,” Briscoe says, “especially a street circuit, some of the corners are naturally a different shape in real life than they are in a sim. Once they get here and build it, sometimes things are different. That was some of it, and the grip level… Even some of the patches of asphalt, we had an idea, but there are still some patches that have been added in the last couple week. Normally, every track you go to, there’s one type of surface. There’s a couple that are two. This one’s, like, six. Sometimes you turn in and it’s one, the middle is another, and the exit is another. That part is really challenging to replicate before you get here.”
The layout, too, is a concern. Briscoe says that the non-flowing layout is “just so challenging” that consistency is difficult to build. “Every corner is so unique and rough, and the grip is so bad, that you never feel like you nail it. Like you blow three or four corners and laugh, because that’s honestly a pretty good lap just because it’s so hard.”
Briscoe describes the race track as “like a cheese grater,” wearing tires down to cords with alarming speed. While a purpose-built concrete track will typically ‘rubber up’ as support series run over the surface, Briscoe says that the surface had not taken much rubber at that point, which contributed to the tire wear issue. The series gave teams one extra set of tires, but Cup Series stints on race day were generally still limited by tire wear rather than fuel.
He was not the only driver befuddled by the quirks of the odd track, either. Speaking to media after practice, Spire Motorsports driver Carson Hocevar says he “had fun,” but calls the track “sketchy.” He notes that he was “more mentally drained than physically,” because “You have to be on edge. You go from super tight sections in the first half to super fast, so you’re just balancing your risk factor. It’s more mentally tiring than anything else.”
23XI Racing owner and Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin worried pre-race about tire degradation. Hamlin says that he ran just eight laps on his first run and “it was all the tires wanted at that point.” The track, on the other hand, was fairly in line with his expectations. There were “a few walls that were maybe a foot off of what I expected, but you adapt. I feel like it’s pretty much what we thought,” Hamlin says.
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Adam Stevens, crew chief for Briscoe and Hamlin’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell, tells R&T that the Naval Base Coronado track is “something.” He adds that the race distances across all three series are “comically too long,” stretched out in part by long caution laps over the 3.4-mile track distance and the track’s propensity to create red flags for track repairs.
Stevens adds that the track was “really, really using up the rear tires in practice” due to the surface variance. He mentions that the newer concrete is particularly low-grip, causing drivers to spin their rear tires and rip off rubber at a high rate. Before the race, he predicted a potential tire crisis by the end of the run distance.
“There wasn’t a car in practice that ran six laps and didn’t have the rear tires go off. And if we use all the tires evenly, we have to run 11 or 12 laps per set. If it doesn’t improve, there are going to be guys that are out of tires at the end of this. It should get a little better, but I don’t think it’s going to get better dramatically.”
In Sunday’s marquee race, track construction issues played out as expected. A crash between the leaders in the narrow section past turn 1 bent a wall out of position and caused a red flag for repairs. Tire issues, on the other hand, were slightly improved. While rear tires coming off the back of just about every car in the field looked completely spent, winning teams were able to stretch the final stint on just one stop rather than the expected two. That tire conservation strategy, particularly among the three 23XI Racing programs that factored into the fight for the race win, seemed unlikely at best before the race started.
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At the moment, this race is a one-off. If NASCAR does continue with it, the pavement, walls, and track layout would all be flagged as places to improve going forward.
“I think if we were going to fine-tune it, and obviously we would after a weekend like this, they could make it a little bit better,” Stevens says. “I do think they could make it a little bit better and reduce the number of caution laps, the number of caution laps and red flags the other series had, just with a couple layout changes of the race track. Nothing drastic, just open up some of the exits. There are some things they can do to make it better, but that’s all hindsight.”
NASCAR has not announced its 2027 schedule or whether or not it plans to return to the Coronado Naval Base. NASCAR did not respond to R&T’s request for comment on this story. The series is also not currently running races on the Chicago street circuit, Bristol dirt track, or Los Angeles Coliseum infield. If the race is a one-off, this could end up being just one of many promising ideas that never turned into a sustainable, recurring event.
Fred Smith’s love of cars comes from his fascination with auto racing. Unfortunately, that passion led him to daily drive a high-mileage, first-year Porsche Panamera. He is still thinking about the last lap of the 2011 Indianapolis 500.