How NASCAR is doing a complete 180 for 2022
By Asher Fair
Six seasons after a NASCAR race track hosted an NCAA football game, an NCAA football stadium is now scheduled to host a NASCAR race.
Back in September 2016, NASCAR race track Bristol Motor Speedway hosted an NCAA football game between the Tennessee Volunteers and the Virginia Tech Hokies.
The high-banked oval in Bristol, Tennessee, despite the fact that it is actually one of the shortest tracks on the NASCAR schedule at 0.533 miles in length, seemingly dwarfed the 120-yard playing field.
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A total of 156,990 fans crowded into the 153,000-seat “Last Great Colosseum”, the fourth largest sporting venue in the United States and the 10th largest in the world, for the historic “Battle at Bristol”.
For a quick comparison, Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium is the fifth largest football stadium in the United States. It seats “only” 102,455. The previous record for most fans at an NCAA football game was 115,109, when the Notre Dame Fighting Irish visited the Michigan Wolverines at the 107,601-seat Michigan Stadium, aka “The Big House”.
You get the idea; one of NASCAR’s most iconic “short track” venues still makes even the biggest football stadiums seem small, and this created a never-seen-before atmosphere for an NCAA football game six seasons ago.
And that brings us to 2022, when NASCAR has done a complete 180 on that epic game from 2016.
Now NASCAR is set to run at race at one of the more iconic NCAA football stadiums in the United States: Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
A quarter-mile short track was built inside the 78,467-seat home of the USC Trojans, and it is set to host the Busch Light Clash exhibition race ahead of the 2022 Cup Series season on Sunday, February 6.
Never before has the Clash been contested outside of Daytona International Speedway. For 42 years from 1979 to 2020, it was contested at the Daytona Beach, Florida track’s four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) high-banked oval. In 2021, it was moved to the venue’s 14-turn, 3.61-mile (5.810-kilometer) road course for the first time.
After 43 years, it now heads west in an attempt to reach a new audience in the same — yet complete opposite — way that the NCAA and NASCAR tried to do so back in 2016.
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The Busch Light Clash is set to mark the unofficial start of the Next Gen era in the NASCAR Cup Series, and it is set to be broadcast live on Fox from Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum beginning at 6:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, February 6.
The 2022 season is officially scheduled to get underway on Sunday, February 20 with the 64th annual Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway, with live coverage set to be provided by Fox beginning at 2:30 p.m. ET.