Finally and out of the blue, Iowa gets to drink from NASCAR’s Cup Series

We don’t know if the NASCAR Cup Series is about to start a long love affair with Iowa, or if it’s a one-night stand.

As people say when nothing insightful comes to mind, time will tell. Until then, it will be fascinating to see how stock car racing’s premier series will do at Newton’s Iowa Speedway and with NASCAR’s television partners.

Iowa getting on the Cup schedule was news out of the blue Monday. If you’d predicted this a few days ago, I’d have said you were dizzy from taking a few laps too many.

Tuesday morning, honchos from NASCAR and Iowa Corn, Gov. Kim Reynolds and Cup Series driver/owner Brad Keselowski were on the state capital grounds, talking up the first Cup Series race ever scheduled in Iowa.

The green flag for the Cream of Corn 400 or whatever it will be called drops next June 16, a Sunday night race on USA Network. We’ve had IndyCar in Newton and it’s been appreciated, but this is America’s top auto racing series.

It’s really happening, 18 years after the track opened and five years after the last NASCAR Xfinity Series and Craftsman Truck Series events got the checkers at the track.

The Cup Series in Iowa in ‘24 wasn’t necessarily supposed to be. NASCAR was hoping to debut an event in Montreal next year to fill a schedule opening caused by the renovation of the track in Fontana, Calif. That didn’t come together. Now we’ll see if the series’ Plan B turns earns an ‘A’ in eight months.

In 2020, getting turned back into cornfields seemed a lot more likely for Iowa Speedway than acquiring a race with the Hamlins and Harvicks and Busches and Loganos. And that was with NASCAR owning the facility, which it has since 2013.

The now-Xfinity Series races were held there from 2009 to 2019, and did well for a while, but the Cup Series remained an elusive fantasy. Its schedule seldom had openings.

When changes were made, they usually were for more-diverse venues than Iowa’s seven-eighths oval, like the one on the streets of Chicago three months ago.

The Xfinity and trucks races were canceled at Iowa in 2020 because of COVID-19, and haven’t been back. IndyCar ran there in 2020 to a reduced crowd, but was absent in 2021.

Then came a renaissance of sorts. Hy-Vee stepped in with sponsorship of IndyCar weekend doubleheaders at the track in 2022 and 2023, getting big-time prerace and post-race concert acts for both days in both years.

Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton, Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney — these weren’t some oldies acts or tribute bands trying to sell a few more beers and keep enough fans in the stands after the race to help with traffic flow.

Even with those heavy hitters, though, tickets for the 2024 IndyCar shows are being cut in price to try to get larger crowds.

One would expect a first-time Cup Series race in Iowa to sell as many tickets as are made available, which is about 25,000 in permanent seating and who-knows-how-many temporary seats.

While the Cup Series has had overall decline in attendance over the last 15 years, there will be hunger for it here. It may be very similar from a television standpoint as the two Field of Dreams baseball games were in Dyserville.

The track and its surroundings have always made for pretty good TV, and the very best of stock car racing should only accentuate that.

The figure tossed around at the Capitol Tuesday was $100,000,000. As in, the financial impact of the race on the Newton/Des Moines area.

I don’t know if that math is solid, but I’m sure there are a lot of digits. Money isn’t the whole thing, though. Just having Iowa, Iowa, Iowa on any network on any Sunday night can’t hurt, especially when it isn’t the Iowa caucuses.

Putting those drivers and cars on that short track at night should be fast fun. You can feel the rumble and hear the roar right now. Somebody better get some earplugs for the neighboring cornstalks.

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