Is the NFL responsible for Kansas’ lack of attendance?
Kansas hosts two NASCAR races annually. But it is not really famous for its NASCAR events. Kansas is home to the Kansas City Chiefs, a popular and immensely successful NFL team. Their success and following might also be the reason for the low NASCAR attendance this week. After all, the Kansas City Chiefs are yet to start their 2026-2027 NFL season.
Once the NFL is back in full swing, there will be a certain influx of fans in Kansas, and that’s when NASCAR ads will get the perfect chance to grab their audience. Right now, there are hardly any people who are ready to travel to Kansas for the spring race of NASCAR. The rising prices and costs of staying during a race weekend do no favors for the same.
The same thing happened with Richmond. Until 2024, it had two races, which were cut down to one from the 2025 season.
After taking these factors into account, it is natural to wonder if the current schedule favors the Kansas race in the NASCAR schedule. Hosting a race weekend is no easy task. It requires a lot of labor and resources, including money. So NASCAR would not want to spend it all on a losing game.
There are multiple tracks that are more popular motorsports destinations and can earn NASCAR a lot more revenue compared to the investment at this time of the year. Hence, there is no indication that Kansas Speedway is a good choice for a spring race.
For NASCAR to maximize the profits from the two races, it would have to schedule them in such a manner that the races coincide with NFL weekends for the Kansas City Chiefs’ games. Only then can the sport hope to capture some of the attention that the city gets from higher footfall. Although once they start doing that, they will have to keep the race weekends in mind.
If Richmond could lose a race due to declining attendance, looking at the stage today it might be worth a conversation on where a Kansas race goes next.
Especially since the Chief’s aren’t playing and the Casino hotel is years behind schedule. #NASCAR
— Speedway Digest (@speedwaydigest) April 19, 2026
In the end, things do look grim for Kansas; there is a chance that the Speedway might end up losing one or both of its races. The issue is that the sport is actively trying to expand its reach among the audience. For that, they are applying an aggressive strategy, dropping multiple tracks in favor of new experiments.
The San Diego street race is a perfect example of the same. NASCAR is going to visit the Naval Base Coronado this year, and people are amped up for the same. If experiments like these end up gaining more traction than the traditional tracks like Bristol and Kansas, NASCAR would not think twice about replacing these tracks.
But there’s a positive side to this story, too. The fans may not be flocking in extraordinary numbers, but they do like the racing at Kansas. Last year, they ended up thrashing a user on a community forum for trying to downplay Kansas as a bad race.
Fans side with Kansas as ‘greatest’ race in the Next-Gen era
In a post on Reddit, a fan argued that Kansas was not a good race anymore, claiming, “Kansas is now coming up, and I have no idea why people are hyped for it. The cracks showed last year at Kansas 2. That race was ok, but nowhere near the first one or the prior years.
“For whatever reason from mid-2024 to today, we have progressively made this car race worse and worse as teams figure it out more.”
What followed in the comments was a brutal takedown by the fans to bring the original post back to reality. A fan started with a highly sophisticated statistical breakdown that proved him wrong.
“Because it’s the highest-rated track in the Next-Gen car per the Jeff Gluck poll as voted on by viewers. It has consistently put up great race after great race in the Next-Gen car, including the closest NASCAR finish ever.”
“Kansas, by design, doesn’t have a lot of cautions and allows for multiple groove racing. It is, by all accounts, the greatest track in the Next-Gen era according to NASCAR’s fans.” Their callout of the incredible finish in 2024 between Kyle Larson and Chris Buescher proves how good the track is at producing natural racing instead of being dependent on pit stops and cautions.
On a similar note, another fan would shut down the criticism to try and keep Kansas on a positive note. “As someone who’s going to the Kansas race for the first time ever, you keep that negativity outta here.”
While it’s true that the fans do love Kansas, the schedule is not defined in a manner that favors the race itself. Thus, for NASCAR, a hard reset is the only way to save the revenue from this particular track, lest they want to cancel it in favor of another.
