NASCAR’s 2027 schedule is a greatest hits album with new songs

NASCAR finally put all the pieces of its 2027 national-series schedules on the table Wednesday, and the biggest surprise may be that there really weren’t any big surprises.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

After spending much of August revealing the 2027 calendar one piece at a time, NASCAR’s official announcement mostly connected the dots. Daytona is getting The Clash back. North Wilkesboro gets the All-Star Race. Chicagoland stays on the schedule. San Diego gets a second shot at its military-base street race. Homestead-Miami gets another turn as the championship finale.

And, perhaps most importantly, NASCAR is showing that it’s becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea that nothing on the schedule has to be permanent.

Which, frankly, is probably a good thing in a sport that spent decades treating its calendar like it had been handed down from Moses.

“The 2027 NASCAR national series schedules reflect the continued momentum of our sport and the strong collaboration across our industry to deliver an innovative and balanced schedule for our fans that challenges the best drivers in the world,” NASCAR Chief Operating Officer Ben Kennedy said. “From the return of NASCAR San Diego and the Wheatley Vodka Clash at Daytona to the NASCAR Championship at Homestead-Miami, this schedule brings together marquee events, iconic venues and key markets while continuing to honor NASCAR’s heritage and evolve for the future.”

That last part — evolve for the future — is really the story.

Kennedy said the schedule is the product of a process that involves NASCAR, its tracks, teams, drivers, broadcast partners and fans, with the organization constantly evaluating what works and what, perhaps, sounded like a better idea in a conference room than it did once actual race cars showed up.

“I would say, you know, first and foremost, certainly a lot of work as we announce a schedule each year that goes in collaboration with the entire industry, whether it’s broadcast partners, race teams, drivers, gathering a lot of information from our fans and helping us develop the schedule,” Kennedy said.

“And it’s an iterative process, because as we’ve shared in the past, we’ve made decisions that haven’t always panned out. We’ve also made other decisions that have been huge successes for the schedule, and this is the next step and the next iteration of it.”

Translation: NASCAR is willing to try things. And if something doesn’t work, it can try something else.

That philosophy is evident all over the 2027 calendar.

The Clash will return to Daytona International Speedway on Feb. 13, restoring the traditional Speedweeks appetizer after four years of experimentation that took the exhibition race from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to Bowman Gray Stadium.

The Clash hasn’t been afraid to travel. It has raced on a superspeedway, a road course, a temporary stadium oval and a historic short track.

Now it’s going home.

“I think we’ve heard that from fans as well, where let’s bring it back to Daytona,” NASCAR Vice President, Market Development & Strategic Scheduling Julie Giese said. “Being able to take it back to Daytona and build out that Speedweeks schedule, kind of creates some of that.”

The move also gives NASCAR the chance to bring the Clash back into the machinery surrounding the Daytona 500, which remains one of the few events in American sports that doesn’t need much introduction.

Speedweeks will run from the Clash through the 69th Daytona 500 on Feb. 21, and the Clash will also debut Daytona’s new Musco LED lighting system.

Meanwhile, Bowman Gray loses The Clash but hardly disappears.

The Craftsman Truck Series will race at the legendary Winston-Salem, North Carolina, bullring on Aug. 20, giving NASCAR another opportunity to use one of the sport’s most distinctive venues without pretending it needs to host the same event every year.

Kennedy, who won at Bowman Gray during his own racing career, said keeping the track in the national-series mix was important.

“Having the opportunities to be stewards of Bowman Gray and take it to the next generation, we were able to do that through The Clash for the past couple of years,” Kennedy said.

NASCAR has also invested in the facility, including new lighting, SAFER barriers, catchfencing and repaving.

So Bowman Gray gets to remain Bowman Gray — which is rather the point — while NASCAR changes what it does there.

That same philosophy is playing out at North Wilkesboro Speedway.

After returning to the Cup points schedule in 2026 for the first time in 30 years, North Wilkesboro will host the NASCAR All-Star Race in 2027 on May 23.

It will also host its first national-series tripleheader, with the Truck Series racing Friday, the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Saturday and the Cup Series All-Star Race Sunday.

The weekend will also celebrate the track’s 80th birthday and the 35th anniversary of “One Hot Night.”

In other words, NASCAR has found a way to turn an old track into a major event without trying to turn the old track into something it isn’t.

That may be one of the more important lessons from the 2027 schedule.

The return of Chicagoland Speedway is another.

After a seven-year absence, the 1.5-mile track returned to the calendar in 2026 following three years of NASCAR racing on the streets of downtown Chicago.

And rather than choosing between the two markets, NASCAR has left the door open to both.

Chicagoland returns June 27, closing Prime Video’s five-race Cup Series window, while Giese said discussions remain ongoing about a potential return to the Chicago street course.

“I think when you look at Chicagoland this year after not racing there since 2019, the weekend itself, I think it’s all safe to say it exceeded its expectations,” Giese said.

“It showed us that this market can accommodate two different races if needed.”

That’s an interesting development because NASCAR spent three years discovering what happens when you put stock cars in the middle of one of America’s biggest cities. The Chicago Street Race produced plenty of spectacle, plenty of weather-related headaches and an entirely different audience.

Chicagoland, meanwhile, proved there was still plenty of appetite for a traditional NASCAR weekend.

So NASCAR’s answer apparently isn’t to declare one winner.

It’s to keep talking.

“We’re going to continue the conversations,” Giese said of a potential Chicago street race return. “We have great relationships with the city of Chicago, whether it’s the mayor’s office, city council, as well as all the different stakeholders and organizations that I think would like to see NASCAR back in downtown, but there’s obviously a lot of things that have to come together for that to occur.”

Then there is NASCAR San Diego.

The series will return to Naval Base Coronado on Aug. 1, 2027, following this summer’s inaugural event, which marked the first NASCAR race on an active U.S. military installation.

The second edition will feature the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series on Saturday and the Cup Series on Sunday.

But the really interesting part may be what happens after that.

NASCAR and the Department of War have established a multi-year plan that could move the military-base street race to another installation beginning in 2028.

“This year was the first of its kind,” Kennedy said. “We’ve never had a race on a military installation before, so a lot of learnings, but also a huge success.”

That means NASCAR is effectively treating San Diego as both a race and a prototype.

It worked. Now the question becomes where else it might work.

And that is increasingly how NASCAR appears to be looking at its schedule.

Not as a fixed collection of tracks, but as a portfolio of events that can be tested, moved, improved, rotated and, when necessary, retired.

Homestead-Miami Speedway provides another example.

For the second consecutive year, the South Florida track will host Championship Weekend, Nov. 12-14.

That would have been notable enough on its own. But the track is also undergoing a roughly $20 million renovation project that NASCAR says will include a new main entrance, a larger midway and activation area, and improvements to hospitality spaces.

Kennedy was particularly blunt about the existing layout.

“If any fans have attended there before, you know how confusing it is to find the main entrance to the track and how it’s buried a bit,” he said. “Frankly, the midway and activation areas were a bit daunting to also navigate as well, so we’re going to blow all of that out.”

That may be the most brutally honest description of a racetrack renovation you’ll hear all year.

The goal, Kennedy said, is to make Homestead feel like a new facility by the time the championship contenders arrive in November.

“It’s just going to feel like a new facility,” he said. “So it’ll be a fresh coat of paint on it, and renovations are currently underway.”

While the Cup Series continues its schedule experimentation, the postseason is getting its own dose of tinkering.

The Chase will begin with Richmond Raceway on Sept. 11, followed by Watkins Glen International and New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

That puts a road course directly into the opening three-race segment of the championship portion of the season and restores Richmond and New Hampshire to prominent fall positions.

The regular season will close with World Wide Technology Raceway, Daytona and Darlington before the Chase begins.

Meanwhile, the Cup Series In-Season Challenge returns with a five-race, 32-driver bracket that will visit a short track, road course, superspeedway, historic oval and military-base street course.

It starts at Iowa Speedway on July 4 and ends at Naval Base Coronado, with $1 million waiting for the winner.

Because apparently the only thing missing from a NASCAR tournament was the opportunity to win a million dollars while driving past an aircraft carrier.

The three national series will also get a couple of collective breaks, with all three off Easter weekend and again Aug. 7-8.

The Truck Series schedule is arguably the most eclectic of the three national calendars, adding Bowman Gray while retaining races at St. Petersburg, Lime Rock Park, Pocono and Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park.

Canadian Tire Motorsport Park also returns Sept. 5 for the first time since 2019, serving as the Truck Series regular-season finale before The Chase begins at New Hampshire.

Giese said the return to Canada was driven in part by the demand she saw from fans and the industry.

“That’s certainly a priority for us across any of our national series,” she said. “We’ve had a really good, long-standing relationship with the team at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park.”

The 2027 calendar also brings back Charlotte Motor Speedway, Nashville Superspeedway, Michigan International Speedway, Lime Rock Park, Sonoma Raceway, Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park and Indianapolis Motor Speedway in various capacities, while Watkins Glen’s dates have now been finalized.

Charlotte gets the Coca-Cola 600 and a Chase race. Nashville, Michigan and Chicagoland make up the bulk of Prime Video’s summer window. The In-Season Challenge then takes NASCAR into Iowa, Sonoma, EchoPark Speedway, Indianapolis and San Diego.

It is, in other words, a lot.

Nearly 100 national-series races, spread across three tours, multiple broadcast partners and a collection of tracks that range from NASCAR’s biggest speedways to places where the walls appear to have been designed by someone who dislikes race cars.

And perhaps that’s the biggest takeaway from the 2027 schedule.

There are still plenty of traditional NASCAR landmarks. Daytona. Charlotte. Bristol. Darlington. Martinsville. Talladega. Homestead.

But there are also military bases, street courses, road courses, revived short tracks and venues that have disappeared from the calendar only to claw their way back.

NASCAR’s Julie Giese has spent the past year helping assemble that enormous puzzle, and she admitted the process has given her an entirely different appreciation for just how many moving parts are involved.

“I’ve been with this company for 26 years and I’ve learned so much about our sport and our industry in the last year, honestly, than I have in my other roles,” Giese said.

That’s because scheduling NASCAR isn’t simply deciding where cars should race.

It’s balancing tracks, teams, fans, broadcasters, markets, travel, dates, weather, history, infrastructure and an increasingly demanding audience that has discovered it quite likes seeing NASCAR do things it has never done before.

The 2027 schedule doesn’t radically reinvent the sport.

It doesn’t need to.

Instead, it looks like NASCAR has taken what it learned from the last few years — the successes, the experiments, the occasional spectacular face-plant — and used those lessons to build the next version.

And if something doesn’t work?

Well, there’s always 2028.

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Greg Engle

Editor in Chief at Cup Scene Daily

Greg is a published award winning sportswriter who spent 23 years combined active and active reserve military service, much of that in and around the Special Operations community.

Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.

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