Insider: How the Music City Grand Prix's downtown Nashville race plans failed completely
At a bar’s open-air patio at the foot of Nashville’s famous Lower Broadway entertainment district last August, IndyCar officials, Music City Grand Prix organizers and political dignitaries celebrated a years-long quest to not only crown a series champion on the city’s streets, but to do so in the heart of “the Monaco of the south.”
“They know racing, and they know Nashville. The know how to pull the whole community together,” Penske Entertainment Corp. president and CEO Mark Miles said that evening of the race’s management crew of CEO Matt Crews, COO Jason Rittenberry and founder of the race’s title sponsor (Big Machine Label Group) Scott Borchetta.
“The only question for us (initially) was, ‘Can you do it? Can you actually pull all these things together, right here in this hallowed ground for this host city?’”
Six months later, the unfortunate, unequivocal answer is: No.
It’s a fact Borchetta, two months into taking over operational control of the race, painfully admitted Wednesday, two hours after the race promoters and IndyCar announced that the series’ 2024 finale would be held 40 minutes east at Nashville Superspeedway, a 1.33-mile D-shaped, concrete oval IndyCar last visited in 2008. The plans announced in August for the revamped event were almost uniformly praised for their aim to deliver the glitz and glamor of hospitality venues within the city’s famous honky-tonks while cars screamed up one of the busiest tourist and entertainment hubs in the country. Now Borchetta has learned it's simply not possible given the current time constraints.
Seemingly basic things like space for teams’ transporters and their hospitality units, the potential conflict with a Titans home game, local funding approval that would’ve dragged into April and proper access for local businesses and Nashville residents were, flatly, overlooked, Borchetta said Wednesday.
With little having changed recently in the Titans’ new stadium construction plans, a project set to be complete in the fall of 2027, Borchetta admitted the biggest failings came in a lack of due diligence in the event's planning. Though perhaps not shouldering nearly as much blame, the event's failing also falls in small part on the shoulders of city government and IndyCar for trusting that the lofty promises could be reasonably executed without digging deep enough, like Borchetta, to discover the truth.
Then again, this was the group that, after years of courting IndyCar to race on Nashville's streets, had not only piqued the series' interest enough to generate serious conversations, but had gained the trust of Roger Penske. Though the first three years of the Music City Grand Prix hadn't been flawless, with last-minute grandstand builds, suites leaking onto the track and a track design that helped feed two initial crash fests, it had all the early makings of one of IndyCar's next longstanding street races in the vein of St. Pete, Long Beach, Detroit and Toronto. Race organizers had earned a level of trust from officials at Penske Entertainment and the city that made it seem as if these lofty goals were achievable.
That was, until someone from the outside -- Borchetta -- took a deep-dive into the specifics. Amid rumors of firings as the uphill battle of staging a downtown Nashville street race this fall came to the forefront, Borchetta did clarify that Rittenberry is still on staff with the race’s promotions group.
“It’s unfortunate, but I’ve just taken control of this in December, and I know what I want to do to protect our brand and the IndyCar brand and to make sure that the fans have a great experience,” Borchetta said. “Every day, it just started to become untenable to do it for this year.
“You might say, ‘Well, Scott, it’s not for eight months.’ Eight months is nothing with all the things that have to be done for a street race. The last thing we were going to do on my watch is fail, and that means fail to have an IndyCar race in Nashville when we’ve had that luxury to be able to do so.”
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Borchetta admitted Wednesday that Nashville Superspeedway has existed in the background as a potential backup plan for the Music City Grand Prix due to the Titans’ multi-billion-dollar construction project. When asked about the event’s contingency plans in October 2022, when the new Nissan Stadium construction project was seeking final approval, Rittenberry admitted to IndyStar that racing at NSS was an option for '24 and '25 – but only as an emergency.
“One thing we’re confident in is there will be a race, and the bridge will be part of it. It’s just about what the route on the east side of the river will be,” Rittenberry said at the time. “It’s absolutely the strategy to keep the race downtown (during construction) and walking distance from Broadway. That’s one of the big selling features of our event."
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Looking back now, according to Borchetta, race organizers should’ve already been waist-deep in the planning stages for the 2024 race on Lower Broadway at that point.
“The team that had been (holding the Music City Grand Prix) successfully on the prior track, I don’t think they really understood how much more it was going to take to actually run through what we call ‘The Island’ downtown,” Borchetta said Wednesday. “It didn’t give any of the municipalities the proper time to really understand and address all this.”
For however long the Music City Grand Prix is to be held at NSS – IndyCar and the race organizers struck a three-year deal in the back-half of last year – Borchetta says he pledges to try and bridge the entertainment capitol of the South and the speedway 40 minutes east. The pit stop competition will continue to be downtown, as will countless rooftop race weekend parties. Borchetta said he'll offer helicopter shuttles for the event’s “upper-end clients,” as well as a midway at NSS jam-packed with music acts to mimic the feel of Broadway as best they can.
“I’m going to say this every time: we’re going to make sure it feels like Nashville, and we accept that responsibility. We want the fans to come,” Borchetta said. “We’re going to make sure the midway is really rocking. We’re going to have music from the time you walk in."
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Both sides said Wednesday they plan to closely monitor the conditions in downtown Nashville and continue conversations with the Titans and city officials to bring the race back downtown “when the time is right.” One source close to the discussions around the race’s future told IndyStar on Wednesday that there remains hope that return can happen before the new Nissan Stadium opens in 3 1/2 years.
When asked when that might be, Borchetta plainly stated Wednesday: “The Titans’ stadium takes precedence for the city. It just does.”
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Borchetta's review of the previous 2024 race plans has led him to believe they may, simply, be too ambitious to properly execute, no matter how much lead-time one might have.
“I think the less we use of downtown, the better,” Borchetta said of future prospects of the Grand Prix on the streets of Nashville. “I want to make sure we touch it, but racing through it like we had proposed for this year, that’s going to continue to be challenging. And the way the East Bank (where the current and future stadiums will be located) is coming together, that’s something we want to be part of, in how we can continue to utilize that footprint.
“I think when we come back downtown, a lot of the race will still happen on the other side of the river.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar: How Music City Grand Prix's downtown Nashville plan failed
