This weekend, the NASCAR Cup Series returns to the streets of Chicago for the third, and possibly final, time. The 2.14-mile street course winds through Grant Park and includes 12 turns, most of them right-handers. It remains the only street course on the NASCAR schedule. Shane Van Gisbergen won the inaugural race in 2023 in his Cup Series debut. Last year, Alex Bowman, on old tires, held off a late charge from Tyler Reddick to win by over 2 seconds.
Persistent rain disrupted both the 2023 and 2024 race weekends and forced NASCAR to shorten the events. Although NASCAR brings wet weather tires and can race in moderate rain, extreme conditions in both years delayed the start times. With no adequate lighting at the circuit, NASCAR had to end both races early due to darkness. In 2023, officials shortened the race from 100 laps to 78. In 2024, even after reducing the scheduled distance to 75 laps, they still had to end the race at just 58 laps. Unfortunately, there is at least some possibility of rain again this year so I will be keeping one eye on the weather.
Chicago is the only street circuit on the schedule for the Cup Series. While street courses do share some similarities with road courses, they are not the same. One need look no further than IndyCar to see that there are some drivers who excel on street courses while they are good, but not great on road courses. So when handicapping this race how a driver has performed here the past two years is a big part of my evaluation. Although given the lack of other street courses on the schedule, recent road course performance remains important.
At Win The Race Shane Van Gisbergen is the clear number 1 in our pre-practice and qualifying scores. With two wins to his name at the Chicago Street course (in addition to his 2023 Cup Series win he won the Xfinity race here in 2024) there is good reason for his dominate score before we see cars on the streets. That said, Christopher Bell is a strong number two in these ranks. Particularly in road course True Performance score and comparable track True Performance score there is a significant gap between Bell and the third place driver, Kyle Larson.
Last year at Chicago Bell had the fastest incident adjusted speed. He also led 14 laps and logged 61.82% of his laps completed inside the Top 3. Unfortunately for Bell, bad luck relegated him to a 37th place “did not finish” result.
In 2023 Bell also had a strong performance at the Chicago Street Course. In that race he led 37 laps. He also logged 15 fastest laps and had a driver rating of 113.5. That race too ended with bad luck for Bell.
In the two road course races of 2025 Bell has continued to show his skill at these types of tracks. He won the first road course race of the year at Circuit of the Americas, driving through the field from 19th. Just a few weeks ago in Mexico City Bell drove through the field from 31st to finish second. Simply put, Bell has shown he can perform well at Chicago and his 2025 performance at the most similar tracks has shown there is no reason to think he won’t continue to have speed on Sunday.
At Win The Race we simulate each NASCAR race 20,000 times using our proprietary performance scores. These scores fuel the simulations with the most reliable data, producing fair market value odds for winners, top 10s, podiums, manufacturers, and head-to-head matchups. Our simulations for the Grant Park 165 show value on Christopher Bell to win at +700, but given the remarkable performance we have seen from Shane Van Gisbergen, I’m willing to pass over that value, and drop to his Top 3 odds, where we still show value on him to finish Top 3. I want to make sure we keep a strong edge, so I would bet this down to +200.
