Saturday afternoon will see the NASCAR Xfinity Series take to the 2.14-mile, 12-turn Chicago street course for the premiere edition of the Loop 121 Chicago Street Race. Roaring down South Columbus Drive adjacent to Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park will be Stewart-Haas Racing wheelman Riley Herbst.
“It’s electric here!” beamed the Las Vegas native on Saturday morning ahead of practice “I can’t explain this enough, how excited I am to get to do this. In all global racing every schedule has a street race and now we finally have a street race in NASCAR.
“I walked the track this morning and it looks awesome. The skyscrapers are there and coming around. In the final corner and over the bridges and next to the lake. There are a lot of tight and squared-off corners, but I guess that’s normal for street racing. If I have any bone to pick, I would say that the exits and the straightaways were very narrow, so it’s going to be tight racing, for sure. Racing here, it is going to be way different than a typical road course just because it’s new to everybody. That’s the most exciting thing about this event — nobody’s done anything like this.”
Herbst explained how the attributes of the circuit will create a unique set of racing circumstances.
“With the ling straights and 90-degree turns, there will be a bunch of drag racing, for sure. The fastest area, from turn five to turn six, will probably be north of 160mph, I’d say — maybe around 170. Whoever gets the braking down the best I think will have good chance at winning because it is just straight aways to 90-degree corners, so whoever’s the most efficient breaking will be the best. It looks a lot of fun.”
Herbst and the No. 98 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford are coming off a runner-up finish that he and new crew chief Devin Restivo left Nashville with last Sunday afternoon.
“Nashville was fun,” related Herbst of his best result of the season to date. “We battled all day long. We had some pit road penalties, which we battled back from and we were able to finish. We had a shot at the win and that’s kind of all you can ask for.”
Of the crew chief change, Herbst said, “It’s been real good so far, but it definitely caught me by surprise. It was definitely an unforeseen change that the company Stewart-Haas Racing had to make. So far, so good. We’ll see how the rest of the year goes.”
After beginning 2023 with six consecutive top-10 finishes, at Richmond Herbst placed 23rd and launched a streak of eight off-key finishes before the Nashville turnaround.
“It was just like a slump,” said Herbst. “We were fast, but we’d be breaking parts just getting into bad situations so we wouldn’t finish well, so it was good to get out of that slump and now we are on the upward swing for sure.
“Our first six weeks of this season were awesome We were leading the points and we were doing everything well and then the next seven races in a row with back-to-back bad finishes hurt us. We are looking to turn that around and get back to the points.
“Some of the results were self-inflicted. Some of it was just racing. It was give and take. Sometimes you have to give a little bit more than you can take and I had to learn that.”
Following Chicago, Herbst and crew will look to a series of oval races including Atlanta, New Hampshire and Pocono before heading back to the road course for Road America.
“It’s good with these tracks,” said Herbst. “We like Atlanta. We’re fast there. We finished fourth there in the spring, so hopefully we can repeat.”
But for now it’s all about Chicago, which Herbst sees shaping up to be an extraordinary 55-lap race and one he and all of his Xfinity competitors want to call their own.
“You’re going to have to definitely send it here just because of how small the margins are,” said Herbst who sits ninth in the Xfinity Series point standings. “Everybody wants to go win the pole and be the fastest qualifier, so we’ll see what happens. Hopefully we can be the inaugural winner of Chicago. I love road racing and hopefully I’ll love street racing, too!”
That would be a first for his six-year Xfinity Series career, and it is something he desperately wants and needs.
“I need that race win as bad as I need oxygen. So hopefully we can get it today.”