Could Gateway Motorsports Park in St. Louis be the next new NASCAR venue?

It’s not the first track that comes to mind when new race weekends are discussed for the future, but maybe Gateway Motorsports Park should be.

NASCAR has done all but announce that once some of its current contracts expire after the 2019 season, it will be shuffling the schedule in ways beyond the year to year tinkering that has been the norm as of late. That almost certainly will mean races in places that don’t have them right now.

Sentiment seems to strongly lean toward more short track events, and because of that, Iowa Speedway is the venue that comes up more often than any other. It already hosts everything but the NASCAR Cup Series, and even IndyCar runs there.

Still, we can’t just assume Iowa is at the top of the list, and there’s always the chance that more than one new track will be added to the schedule. With that in mind, Autoweek makes a pretty convincing argument that Gateway Motorsports Park could be in the mix, thanks to two factors that might set it apart from other contenders.

The first of those is that it has already proven it can fill the stands with a St. Louis market that is apparently hungry for racing.

"The greater St. Louis area boasts more than 2 million residents, and Gateway drew more than 40,000 of them for the return of the Verizon IndyCar Series in 2017. The follow-up event this summer drew somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000."

That’s no small thing. NASCAR doesn’t want to change the Cup Series schedule just for the sake of change. It wants to replace races where tracks are having trouble putting butts in seats with events that have good crowds. For Gateway Motorsports Park to have already proven itself in that regard can’t be overlooked.

But there’s another thing, too, that suggests it’s willing to do whatever it takes to host a NASCAR Cup Series race: It’s even willing to do it during the week. Track owner Curtis Francois explained why to Autoweek.

"I think Gateway is uniquely positioned to host a midweek race. One of the things you have to consider for a midweek race is that people may have to take work off on a Tuesday or Thursday for a Wednesday race if they are going to travel.But with St. Louis, we are five minutes away from downtown. We would have a huge local group who would take advantage of what I think would be a very unique motorsports event. Because we’re so close to the population center, Gateway could make a midweek race flourish and be really special."

It’s an interesting notion that couldn’t be anything but speculation until put to the test. Trying both new tracks and mid-week races in 2020 would be a dramatic move for NASCAR, but given how things have been trending this decade, it would be hard to argue that it wouldn’t be a worthy experiment.

Like Iowa, Gateway already hosts the Truck Series and IndyCar (though not the XFINITY Series). At 1.25 miles, it doesn’t qualify as a short track, but it doesn’t race like one of the intermediate circuits that already make up way too much of the schedule.

So while it isn’t the first place that pops into your head when considering where NASCAR should go next, maybe it should be. St. Louis racing fans, you might want to make sure you head out to one of the other events in 2019 just to keep your track as visible as possible for when that 2020 slate starts coming into focus.