NASCAR Announces Exhibition Race Inside LA Coliseum In Early 2022

LOS ANGELES —NASCAR announced Tuesday that it will hold its 2022 preseason Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, marking the first time big-league, stock-car racing will be held at the 98-year-old stadium.

In a release, NASCAR announced that the annual exhibition race will take place on Feb. 6 of next year, and will be held outside of Daytona International Speedway for the first time since its inception in 1979.

The event will be contested around a quarter-mile asphalt oval that will be built around the facility's football field, NASCAR said.

"I think the large fan base that we have here in Los Angeles, the largest that we actually have in the nation, paired with exciting racing and being here in the downtown Los Angeles market, I think will be really special," said Ben Kennedy, NASCAR's senior vice president of strategy and innovation

Kennedy told NASCAR.com that racing officials and representatives from the Coliseum began discussions about the event in 2019, but they were paused because of the pandemic. Talks resumed early this year, and NASCAR put a team on the project earlier this summer, Kennedy said.

Series officials toured the facilities at the 77,500-seat stadium during last weekend's University of Southern California versus Stanford football game, according to NASCAR.com. The stadium underwent a $315 million renovation in 2018, replacing the general seating and adding luxury boxes and club-level suites.

The Coliseum has hosted motorsports before, with both supercross and speedway motorcycle races, off-road trucks and rallycross events, all of which have competed on a temporary dirt course.

However, the Clash will be contested on an impermanent paved track - which will the shortest track the Cup Series has competed on in the modern era, according to NASCAR.com. Construction of the track is scheduled to start on New Year's Day 2022.

NASCAR said the format for the Clash and details about driver eligibility for the event would be announced at a later date.

The Clash also is expected to give fans a glimpse of NASCAR's new Next Gen car in race conditions ahead of its 2022 Cup Series debut.

Though the Clash will be the first NASCAR event at the Coliseum, the series does have a tradition of racing in Southern California, NASCAR officials said. National series events are scheduled to return to the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana this year, and the Cup Series previously held events in Ontario and Riverside. Meanwhile, the ARCA Menards Series West still competes in Irwindale.