NASCAR 101: Las Vegas Was Product, Survivor of NASCAR’s ‘Cookie-Cutter’ Expansion in Booming ’90s

There was no better time to get involved in NASCAR racing than in the 1990s.

During a period of time in which NASCAR became America’s favorite motorsport and one of the most popular spectator sports in the country, everyone wanted a piece of the 200-mph pie.

During the 1990s, NASCAR put forward its own attempts at westward expansion and manifest destiny. It was during this boom period that Las Vegas Motor Speedway became reality.

“We designed this track for the year 2000,” Clyne told the New York Times in September 1996.

That same year, Bruton Smith and Speedway Motorsports bought the facility. It was then that the track shot into the national limelight.

In NASCAR’s 50th anniversary season in 1998, the Winston Cup Series visited LVMS for the first time. Mark Martin won the inaugural Cup Series event at the track, leading 82 of 267 laps.

Twenty-seven years later, Las Vegas has remained a staple of NASCAR — not something that can be said for the other ‘cookie-cutter’ venues that entered the sport alongside it.

Another SMI track, Texas Motor Speedway, held its inaugural Cup Series race one year earlier in 1997. For years, Texas was Smith’s magnum opus: a facility that was up there with the most impressive sporting venues in the country. The track seated 150,0000 spectators at its height, and it seemed like nothing could dampen the mood surrounding a track that encapsulated NASCAR’s ’90s boom.

Nearly three decades after Texas was NASCAR’s shiny new superpower, the track remains on the schedule. But TMS is no longer the giant it once was. Not even the All-Star Race could save it from being cut down to one date on the calendar. A poorly received reconfiguration and repaving has seen Texas shrink into the shadows of the schedule. Ironically, North Wilkesboro Speedway, a previously defunct track that Texas had a hand in nixing from the schedule, was the track that the All-Star Race moved to in 2023 after Texas’ two-year stint as host.

But as your parents probably told you when you were young, it’s important to be thankful for what you have. Texas, at least, remains on the schedule. The same can’t be said for California Speedway, which debuted on the Winston Cup Series schedule in 1997. After 27 years’ worth of Cup Series races at the two-mile facility, it was chopped off the schedule after 2023. The plan for the track’s future was a new short track on the land on which the track once sat, but those plans remain stagnant over two years after Auto Club Speedway fell silent.

In 2000, the Kentucky Speedway opened, and 11 years later, the 1.5-mile track was awarded with a Cup Series date. Fans were stuck in horrendous traffic and were eventually turned away as the night wore on. As it turns out, the ominous conditions surrounding the first race should’ve been a sign. Less than a decade after Kentucky Speedway first played host to the Cup Series — a track heralded by Smith as the biggest event of the 2011 NASCAR season the week after the disastrous inaugural race — it was off the schedule and sentenced to racetrack purgatory as a multi-use rental complex.

Chicagoland Speedway was another fallen soldier, as the 1.5-mile track never returned to the NASCAR schedule after the COVID season in 2020.

Las Vegas is not the only track from NASCAR’s cookie-baking spree to remain on the schedule. Kansas Speeedway, Homestead-Miami Speedway and World Wide Technology Raceway have survived to the present day.

But unlike Texas and Kentucky, Las Vegas, ironically, never got in over its head. It didn’t tout itself as the next big thing in NASCAR, nor the biggest thing in NASCAR. Amidst the glitz and glamour of the Strip, Las Vegas has remained a relatively humble, steadfast track on the schedule, always waiting for NASCAR to make its annual visits.