NASCAR's Chicago race weekend is all wet again — but let's not give up on it yet

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.

Sometimes it rains.

That’s a baseball-inspired way of saying that — for the second summer in a row — NASCAR’s signature downtown Chicago race was all wet.

Look, many of us around these parts are still learning the ins and outs of communicating in stock-car terms. One slippery lap at a time, we’ll get there.

Oh, and sometimes you wake up naked on a bathroom floor. That’s what driver Alex Bowman predicted for himself Sunday night after winning a rain-delay-shortened Cup Series race under an 8:20 p.m. deadline.

“We’re gonna drink so much damn bourbon tonight,” Bowman said after his first Cup win since 2022. “It’s gonna be a bad deal.”

God bless America.

A year ago, the conceit in much of the local media coverage of the first Chicago Street Race weekend was that it was so new and different from the types of sporting events we were used to, we barely knew what the hell we were looking at and, thus, really couldn’t get the stories wrong as long as we were there trying.

Your old pal here leaned into it big-time, bumbling and BS-ing like a first-year student in a fourth-year foreign-language class. By the end, truth be told, it felt rather silly.

On the other hand, it worked OK because of the unintended theme to NASCAR’s maiden foray onto our lakefront: Mother Nature rendered it a disaster.Last year’s Saturday Xfinity Series race, the Loop 121, was rained out after 25 of a scheduled 55 laps. Sunday’s Cup Series race, the Grant Park 220, was delayed 90 minutes due to rainfall that obliterated Chicago’s previous record for July 2 — set way back in 1982 — and eventually had 25 of the scheduled 100 laps lopped off the back end just so the race could reach a conclusion. A bunch of concerts and other non-race activities were called off, a total bummer.

But even if we weren’t fluent enough in stock-car racing to do the details of a pair of street races justice, we damn sure could talk about the weather.

And yet even at that, despite the out-and-out messiness, the Sunday race was NBC’s most-watched Cup Series competition in six years. It still was an undeniable spectacle, with the lake’s beauty framing one side and the skyline’s majesty framing the rest and NBC referring to its telecast as a “love letter to Chicago.” Melodramatic, sure, but nice. The weekend came off as a worthwhile experiment.

And now, in Year 2? Well, we got soaked again on Sunday, but at least we made a little more sense of things.

The Loop 121 became the Loop 110 this time, shortened to 50 laps. The Grant Park 220 became the Grant Park 165, planned going in at 75 laps. Both distances are plenty long enough, we’re sure, or would be if Mother Nature deigned to cooperate.

Saturday’s race — not to mention all the scheduled concerts — got in under stellar weather conditions, thank goodness, a taste of how such a weekend might unfold under ideal circumstances. But things got wet again at the onset of Sunday’s race, and eventually the skies really opened up — less so than last year, mind you, but enough to gum up the works with a prolonged delay.

By the time 8:20 rolled around, touching off a mad sprint by Bowman for the checkered flag, 75 laps was a pipe dream. Bowman completed only 58 laps, which would just plain have to be enough with darkness setting in.

Still, it didn’t take a tread-head to recognize that the spectacle of NASCAR in Chicago showed up again in 2024 as a pretty cool thing. So here’s to drier luck next time.

And here’s to an end of viewing NASCAR as being of a different world, of viewing a stock-car race in Chicago as some sort of a sports mutant.

Who are we to thumb our noses at this or any other sport, given how monumentally awful our various teams have been of late? As race fans wrung out their overalls, Bulls fans were just beginning to get used to DeMar DeRozan having been traded, Cubs fans were absorbing the news that pitcher Colten Brewer had broken his hand punching a wall, and White Sox fans were, well, are there any Sox fans left?

As MLB Network pointed out just the other night, if you take the Cubs’ and Sox’ 2024 records and add them to the most recent full-season records of the Bulls, Blackhawks and Bears, you have a combined winning percentage of well under .400 that — dear Lord — is the worst percentage for those five teams in any comparable time of year since the Bulls started playing in 1966.

In that sense, maybe a slopped-up, sloshed-up street race fits our town like a glove.