May 02, 2025
Thom Carroll/for PhillyVoice
NASCAR President Steve O'Donnell is intrigued by the idea of holding a race at the University of Pennsylvania's historic Franklin Field in West Philly. NASCAR has held events at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in recent years as part of a push to serve fans in big cities that don't have marquee race tracks.
The University of Pennsylvania's Franklin Field — site of the annual Penn Relays and the Philadelphia Eagles' former home field — could be on NASCAR's radar for a future auto racing event.
NASCAR President Steve O'Donnell mentioned the possibility of bringing a race to West Philly during a conversation in New York earlier this week with the Associated Press Sports Editors organization, PennLive reported Friday. O'Donnell said Franklin Field was one of the venues NASCAR looked at before holding a series of races at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, whose field was transformed for exhibitions in each of the last three years.
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“When you look at opportunities, one of the places we looked around with the Coliseum was in Philly, Franklin Field," O'Donnell said. "It was one of the only ones that we could put a race track inside of because of the Olympic size track. Those are the types of things in a city we’re going to look at because the days of just building a rural track are over.”
Despite having a large racing fanbase, the Northeast has been an "underserved" market for NASCAR events because of a lack of suitable venues in big cities, O'Donnell said. The premier auto racing tracks in the region include Dover Motor Speedway, which holds about 54,000 people, and the Pocono Raceway that seats about 76,800.
Franklin Field, built at 33rd and South streets in 1895, has a capacity of about 52,000. The U-shaped lower bowl that replaced its wooden bleachers was added in the 1920s along with a second level of seating. Like the LA Coliseum, Franklin Field has a 1/4-mile track that would be used for short track races with fewer drivers than NASCAR's marquee events. The most common track ovals are 1 1/2 miles around, but NASCAR events are held on tracks anywhere from half a mile long up to Superspeedways that can run 2 1/2 miles or longer.
Penn Athletics did not immediately respond to questions about whether the university has had discussions with NASCAR about an auto racing event at Franklin Field.
To build its asphalt tracks at the LA Coliseum, NASCAR put down a layer of plastic visqueen sheeting on the stadium's field before burying a second layer of plywood with 500 truckloads of dirt. The banked race track was built with about 1,560 tons of asphalt. The process, which took about three weeks, is shown in the time-lapse video below. O'Donnell said building out the track cost "significantly" more than $1 million.
NASCAR held another exhibition in February on the quarter-mile track at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where Cup Series races have periodically taken place since 1958.
NASCAR has found creative ways to reach new live audiences in recent years. Chicago hosted Cup Series street races in each of the last two years by closing streets in a downtown area near Grant Park and Buckingham Fountain. The urban circuit features 12 turns and runs a bit more than 2 miles. The event in Chicago is part of a larger festival that will return to the city in July.
In addition to hosting track and field events, Franklin Field is the home of Penn's football and lacrosse teams. The Eagles played there from 1958 to 1970 — before the team moved to Veterans Stadium — and the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 as part of the university's campus historic district. The stadium has undergone significant renovations to reinforce its concrete stands over the last decade, and Penn completed a new locker room for the football team along with other upgrades last year.
O'Donnell said the street races in Chicago are just the start of his plans to bring NASCAR events to big cities.
“We’re just barely scratching the surface of what cities those can be," he said. "It’s very expensive to do that, so you’re not going to see us racing in 20 different cities – it doesn’t make sense because we’ve got iconic race tracks – but we have the ability to now put that in play.”
