TNT analyst Steve Letarte on NASCAR Chicago Street Race: ‘Zero margin of error’

The setting for the NASCAR Chicago Street Race gets a lot of attention, and rightly so. But what about the racing?

“The biggest challenge for the drivers is that there’s zero margin of error anywhere on the entire track.”

Yikes!

That was Steve Letarte, who’ll be on the call for the Cup Series race Sunday on TNT. He’s a former crew chief for Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., so his bonafides are strong.

“Every other road course we run has runoff in most areas,” Letarte said. “But this is 12 turns, and there’s not a single corner that if you are too fast or miss your mark, you’re gonna hit something.”

How is a driver supposed to handle that?

“It’s risk vs. reward,” he said. “We’re talking about the best stock-car drivers in the world. They need to decide how close to the edge they wanna be. That’s really the magic of this.”

Letarte thinks Shane van Gisbergen, who won the inaugural Chicago race in 2023, is the favorite. He also won on the Mexico City road course three weeks ago. Van Gisbergen was a three-time champion on the Australian Supercars circuit, which races on road courses. So Chicago is his kind of track. But he sees plenty of competition.

“I asked him specifically who his biggest competitor was,” Letarte said, “and it was funny because he said that it really rotates. He mentioned [Tyler] Reddick, [Chris] Buescher, [Christopher] Bell. And so the fact that who I think is the favorite doesn’t have a singular driver he’s looking at just tells you the depth of the field.”