NASCAR goes West to LA Coliseum as warmup for the Super Bowl

LOS ANGELES » NASCAR is hitting Los Angeles a week ahead of the Super Bowl, grabbing the spotlight with its wildest idea yet: The Clash, the unofficial season-opening, stockcar version of the Pro Bowl, will run at the iconic Coliseum in a made-for-Fox Sports spectacular.

Yes, that’s correct. A temporary track has been built inside the Coliseum, where race cars will rattle around a quarter mile of asphalt carefully laid over the grass field that has hosted two summer Olympics, the USC Trojans and the hometown Rams for three seasons until their new stadium opened in 2020.

The first Super Bowl in 1967 was played at the Coliseum,

but the Rams will play for the NFL championship 10 miles away at Sofi Stadium a week from Sunday. NASCAR is offering an appetizer with its seasonopening event, until now raced every year since its 1979 inception at Daytona International Speedway in Florida.

Run under different formats with different presenting sponsors over the years, The Clash was the opening event of Speed Weeks and a warmup for the Daytona 500 — NASCAR’s own version of Super Bowl. But NASCAR has been willing to look beyond cookie-cutter tracks in traditional markets.

Ben Kennedy, NASCAR’s senior vice president of strategy and innovation, brainstormed moving The Clash exhibition out of Daytona

for the first time and instead stage it as a Hollywood event not all that far from Hollywood. The Busch Light Clash will run Sunday night, heat races will set the field, DJ Skee will play during cautions and Ice Cube will headline a halftime show.

The Coliseum accommodates about 78,000, but modifications to build the track has cut capacity for Sunday night to roughly 60,000 seats. Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR’s chief racing development officer, said polling shows 70% of ticket-buyers have never previously purchased a ticket to a NASCAR race.

Add in some six-plus hours of coverage across Fox Sports and NASCAR has already deemed the event a success.

“You want to put on a good race,” O’Donnell said. “But I would say, already it is a success. The number of celebrities we have showing up, the enthusiasm and promotion we’ve seen from Fox just for this race, even during NFL broadcasts, it’s been unprecedented.”

The Clash will at long last mark the debut of NASCAR’s new car, a years-long project meant to design a cost-efficient but competitive vehicle that can potentially close the gap between the NASCAR powerhouses and the small teams looking to gain footing in the series. The pandemic delayed the rollout of the Next Gen by a year, and no matter how much testing has been done, there is no clear idea how the car will race until a real trophy is on the line.