NASCAR: IMS Presidents thinks NASCAR will return to the oval

Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Doug Boles told Sirius Radio Friday that the speedway has had conversations about a return for NASCAR competition on the track’s signature 2.5-mile oval configuration.

Due to the grandstands being so empty it was an embarrassment to NASCAR, the speedway has held its NASCAR events on its road course configuration over the past two years and will do so again in 2023.

🗣️ “Winning on the oval is special.”@IMS President @jdouglas4 says #NASCAR returning to the oval at The Brickyard will happen “sooner rather than later”. 🧱#NASCAR | #TMDNASCAR pic.twitter.com/GorkB8iV52

— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90) (@SiriusXMNASCAR) January 27, 2023

“Those conversations have happened. In fact, they continue to happen,” Boles said. “… We never said we’re not gonna go back to the oval when we switched to the road course. We wanted to see how it worked. That’s why we started with Xfinity and then rolled it into Cup, and then we wanted to give it some time to really see how it worked instead of just one year.

“However, we’ve talked about the importance of the oval. And if you think about a lot of the drivers … Winning on the oval is special. So we do want to get on the oval at some point in time.”

“We haven’t decided exactly how that looks,” Boles said. “I will tell you that I do think you’ll see that sooner rather than later. And then we’ll just figure out what the long-term looks like in terms of our cadence with the road course and the oval.”