Las Vegas native and NASCAR hall of famer Kurt Busch has seen the sports landscape grow from the then Las Vegas Stars to multiple major league teams.
NASCAR was a leader in major sporting events competing in Southern Nevada home, with the racing series calling the area home since 1998.
Busch, who retired from NSACAR in 2023 and now serves in an advisory role for Michael Jordan’s 23XI racing team, said when NASCAR first started racing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, he was unsure that fans would travel to the track that was then miles past the northern outskirts of the city, near Nellis Air Force Base.
But 27 years later the track has two races with the South Point 400 being part of the NASCAR playoffs. The fan base has kept making that trek, that has seen more and more get built out that way over the years.
“It’s a tourism town and we didn’t think the track would work,” Busch said Friday at the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. “Like it’s so far out there, it’s next to the Air Force Base, but it did.
“It’s been huge. You know, it’s part of NASCAR’s playoffs. I consider it a marquee win when you win the Vegas race. It’s my hometown, but it is in the top five (races to win).”
Las Vegas is home to the NFL’s Raiders, the NHL’s Golden Knights, the WNBA’s Aces, MLB’s Athletics two years away from playing on the Strip and Formula One has hosted the Las Vegas Grand Prix for three years. Busch doesn’t think NASCAR is overshadowed by the teams and the events who play in the resort corridor.
“With the sports vibe here now in Vegas, I think it’s just the generational shift of what’s going on, especially the Raiders, and Tom Brady’s involved, and Vegas is still doing strongly,” Busch said. “Everything around the track continues to grow because of the other sports coming in.”
F1 and NASCAR offer different styles of racing and boast different fan bases. The annual F1 race in and around the Strip leads to weeks of road work and hourslong shut downs of the Strip for Grand Prix weekends to occur each November. Busch said there’s room for both in Southern Nevada, with each having their own pluses and minuses about them.
“It’s a catch-22,” Busch said. “With Formula One, they want to be more towards city centers with newer tracks and newer places that they go. … And yet, there’s positives and there’s negatives. Like the people don’t have to go all the way out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but everything’s right here (for F1).
“So, it hurts with traffic, going east and west across the Strip in Vegas. But I see there’s positives and negatives to anything. But again, it’s just adapting, evolving, and continuing to move forward. This town knows it’s tourism and this town knows how to bring people in from around the globe.”
Although Busch has no issues with F1 racing around city streets in Las Vegas, he hopes to see the open-wheel races give the hometown track a try someday.
“I don’t see it as a problem,” he said. “but it’d be cool if they tried our big track out there once and see how it went.”
Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on X.
