{"id":102319,"date":"2025-08-22T17:28:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T17:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/102319\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T17:28:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T17:28:08","slug":"elliott-says-nascar-venue-is-closest-to-football-stadium-motorsport-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/102319\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliott says NASCAR venue is ‘closest’ to football stadium – Motorsport – Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chase Elliott says “intimate” Bristol Motor Speedway is the closest NASCAR comes to creating a football stadium environment. The NASCAR playoffs start following this weekend’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona, with Hendrick Motorsports star Elliott among the favorites<\/a> to end the season as Cup Series champion.<\/p>\n

The Round of 16 will be the first stage for NASCAR<\/a>‘s 16 playoff contenders. Races will be held at Darlington Raceway and World Wide Technology Raceway before heading to Bristol Motor Speedway, where the Round of 12 will be settled.<\/p>\n

Elliott<\/a> is looking forward to America’s Night Race at Bristol and has praised the environment it creates for NASCAR, claiming the track is as close as it gets to a football stadium. Bristol also recently hosted the MLB Speedway Classic<\/a> between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds.<\/p>\n

“People always ask me the best races, the best race track,” Elliott said. “It’s hard to beat Bristol, such a great environment, something you don’t get everywhere we go.”<\/p>\n

“Bristol does such a great job of bringing the action of what NASCAR has to offer to the fan in an intimate manner,” Elliott continued. “Everything is right there close.<\/p>\n

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“We don’t get that stadium environment in racing like you get in football and other sports. Bristol has always been the closest thing to that. It’s a lot of fun for us as competitors and the fans feed off that.”<\/p>\n

President and general manager Jerry Caldwell is also excited for the NASCAR playoff race on a weekend that gives fans a county fair vibe. “Playoffs produce a lot of excitement,” Caldwell said.<\/p>\n

“Bristol produces excitement on its own. For that to be part of the playoff just makes a lot of sense, and I think the fans have responded really well. The drivers seem to like it. Some of them love it, some of them hate it, but that’s what we like. That’s what produces excitement.”<\/p>\n

DON’T MISS<\/p>\n

“There is nothing else like Bristol out there,” Caldwell added. “It is the last great Colosseum. It’s a football stadium on steroids.<\/p>\n

“You go into that place and you’ve got 40 cars, running 130 miles an hour right in front of you. And all these people are completely bowled over. It’s an electric environment, and it’s just something that you don’t replicate anywhere else in the country.”<\/p>\n

Should Elliott fight through the playoff rounds, the Cup Series championship will be settled in Phoenix, Arizona, later this year in November.<\/p>\n

Defending champion Joey Logano of Team Penske is also in the playoffs. Still, the No. 22 has struggled for form in 2025, while Elliott’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron was handed a significant playoff boost after being crowned the regular season champion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chase Elliott says “intimate” Bristol Motor Speedway is the closest NASCAR comes to creating a football stadium environment.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102320,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[441,68275,4569,1960,425,349,51833,99],"class_list":["post-102319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-chase-elliott","tag-college-football-section","tag-football-section","tag-motorsport-section","tag-nascar","tag-nfl","tag-nfl-section","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}