NASCAR President Steve Phelps joined SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday to give a progress report on how he feels the sport is doing now that we’re almost through the initial plan. 

On April 30, NASCAR announced their intended return to action. In order to resume their season during the midst of a pandemic, some changes needed to be made. First, they were going to stay near base (Charlotte) in the southeast, even running weeknight races as needed. Then, they’d limit the amount of folks needed at the race tracks by not having practice or qualifying. Next, they’d keep the races behind closed doors to prevent the spread amongst fans. 

On Wednesday night at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, that first phase of reopening their sport will have concluded. Seven races in 10 days across the top three forms of the national series would have ran without a hitch. Also, prior to the return at Darlington, May 14 to be exact, NASCAR also laid out phase 2 for the season. Again, they’d stick to the southeast, run a weeknight race, run races without fans and conduct them without practice or qualifying. 

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Now, with two week increments on their scheduling updates, if that stays the same, could we expect another one for July on Thursday? Phelps said it could be this week or next for that to happen actually.

“We’re working hard on it,” Phelps said on the NASCAR channel on Tuesday morning. “We’ve got to make sure the state and local governments are good to go for us, and whether it’s racing with fans or racing without fans. So, as we get those yeses, those dominoes fall, we’ll get that announced.”

The writing is on the wall for NASCAR to have to venture back outside of the southeast during this next phase whenever it is announced. They would have visited almost every track down there during this process. Plus, the race weekend at the Pocono Raceway at the end of June appears to have been given the green light to run without race fans anyways. That means the first race weekend of the third phase would be two races on the 2.5-mile Pennsylvania race track. From there, Indianapolis is up and all signs are pointing to the Brickyard 400 weekend not only being able to be ran, but also doing so in front of race fans too. 

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“As quickly as we can get back to racing with fans, we’ll do that,” said Phelps continued. “But it needs to be safe. We need to make sure our fans are safe and feel safe to come back. There will be protocols put in place that will be different than they were before this pandemic.”

That would take care of three races in two weekends. If they want to keep the weeknight theme, they could keep Kentucky Speedway in July, but move it up from a Saturday night to a Wednesday night affair since the 1.5-mile track is just a couple of hours south of Indianapolis. While the teams are up here, why not run both within a few days of each other. Plus, the Indy and Pocono cars will likely be the same and the backup cars could be the Kentucky car. 

In terms of weeknight races in general and their future, Phelps admits that those will stay around for future scheduling — albeit not as prevalent as they were in this return. 

“I don’t think we’re going to make a regular occurrence of it,” Phelps said of weeknight events. “A lot of what NASCAR is about is kind of that sense of family, sense of community, the opportunity to go to a racetrack and go camping and be there for three or four days, and that’s something that important to our fans. It’s important to the community at large.

“But do I think we’ll have some one-day shows where you come in and race on a Wednesday night? Yeah, I think we’ll probably see some of that moving forward.”

Speaking of those race “weekends” what happens to one-day shows? So far, it’s worked and Phelps even admitted that they’re going to take a look at the entire event as a whole and see if they need as much practice sessions or even qualifying at races in the future too. 

“There are some things that we’ll look at both this year and the offseason,” said Phelps. “Typically, we practice three times. Do we need to practice three times? I don’t know. That is something we, as an industry, will determine.

“Having cars on racetracks, is that something that’s important with respect to a practice? Or isn’t it? Or frankly, do you have a better show when you don’t practice? And those are some of the things we need to look at.”

For this season though, Phelps says that the goal is to go back to the old normal at some point and have that traditional race weekend that we saw in February and March.

“Do I think at some point this year we’re going to have a schedule that looks more like it did when we left Phoenix? I think the answer is probably yes. Again, what that looks like and will it be tweaked or will it be cut back a little bit, those are all things we need to determine, and we’ll do that working with our industry.”