NASCAR’s Senior Vice President of Competition John Probst noted that the route for the street course at Naval Base Coronado in San Deigo has been finalized…but it isn’t “ideal”.
The 3.4 mile 16 turn course has a number of limitations due to the constraints of the Naval Base, including permanent buildings that cannot be moved.
In particular Turn 4 is being listed as “problematic”. Probst noted, “I can report that we do have a final course layout at this point that will require some paving of the track. There are areas of it, particularly turn 4, where we have to do some work.”
He added, “we’ve had drivers running various versions of this course for months now, back into last year. Hats off to SVG (Shane van Gisbergen) and [Austin] Cindric, [Christopher] Bell, [William] Byron, drivers like that have been working with Jerry Kaproth here at the R&D center to finalize the course layout.”
Turn 4 is a part of what NASCAR has named the “Carrier Corner” – the part of the course that runs alongside San Diego Bay.
Probst said, “there’s some tracks that they use to load the aircraft carriers that are probably a little bit problematic for the cars, but certainly something that will be unique to that racetrack, something that we will have to sort of mitigate.”
All three series – Craftsman Truck, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and Cup – will be racing that weekend.
Probst noted, “we’ll mitigate what we can, but the drivers will have to deal with some unique features that a course like that will throw at us. But certainly, it’s an honor for us to go out there and race in June.”
The street course races at Naval Base Coronado are scheduled for June 19-21.