NASCAR COO Ben Kennedy met with the media following Sunday’s inaugural NASCAR weekend at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. While no decisions have been made about the future of the event, Kennedy called the weekend a “tremendously successful event,” said NASCAR would “love to return,” and highlighted the strong attendance, new-fan engagement and partnership with the U.S. Navy. The complete transcript is below.
Press Conference
Sunday, June 21, 2026
An Interview with: Ben Kennedy
THE MODERATOR: We’re now joined by Ben Kennedy. There was a ton of buzz, a great event. Talk to us about how the weekend went.
BEN KENNEDY: First of all, thank you all for coming out here, covering our sport, being here in San Diego.
We said from the start this is more than a race, this is a mission. I think we all looked around the room today and we said mission has been accomplished.
Really proud of the effort the entire team has put into this. Obviously our partnership with the United States Navy has been tremendous. Not only do they fight for our country and freedom every single day, but Naval Base Coronado opened up their doors. This is their backyard, it’s where they live, work, play. They opened up their base to us, let us in, have been tremendous partners.
Huge shout-out to Captain Loren Jacobi, “Wookie.” He’s been a great partner to us. And to the entire NASCAR team, we have a lot of folks have been working on this for the past 18 months to two years. Amy Lupo has been at the spear of that team from day one. We brought her on from the Clash of the Coliseum for three years. She helped lead that project. She has been the boots on the ground since day one. We truly would not be here without her. We appreciate her.
We appreciate all of our teams, our partners coming in on board, FOX, CW, Amazon Prime. You had a chance to watch the coverage today. I think what is remarkable, not only the live coverage, which they do a phenomenal every weekend, but all the stories they told. You got to see some of those today, the stories of the people that work in our industry, military, veterans, people here in San Diego or on the base. We told a lot of those stories, and Prime did an amazing job of that. We have a bunch of great partners to pull off that.
Last thing I’ll say is, you guys will ask about this, what does the future look like, are we coming back, are we not coming back.
What I can tell you is we feel this is a tremendously successful event. We want to be respectful that this is an active military base at the same time. This is a great partnership, a great pairing being the 250th anniversary of the United States Navy, 250th anniversary of the United States of America. Couldn’t ask for a better time than this. We would love to return. We’re also cognizant of the fact this is active military base. We want to be mindful of that, as well.
Thank you.
THE MODERATOR: We’ll open it up for a few questions.
You seem to want to come back. The teams seemed largely happy across the board. If the Navy is on board with this, what is stopping you from coming back?
BEN KENNEDY: So this is the first time we’ve done anything like this. Chicago is as close as you could get to it. First time we’ve been on a military installation. We’ve had a lot of things we’ve learned over the last two years, a lot of things we learned over the last 48 hours, and some changes we’ve made over that period of time.
What we are going to do after this weekend is have a deep dive after-action review with our entire team. We’re going to sit down with the United States Navy and talk about what did we learn, what worked well.
You guys had a chance to go around this weekend, see some new activations and elements that we were testing. Might be able to apply to other tracks. Some areas we want to make improvements on going forward.
I’d like to sit down with them, have a debrief, then have a conversation about is there an opportunity for us to return here.
Nothing to report today. A lot more conversations we’ll have after this weekend.
What would you like to see improved? Where did you feel it maybe fell short?
BEN KENNEDY: We had a conversation about this earlier. I think going into this weekend one of the things that we were most mindful of is the amount of people that you can, frankly, get on and off of the base. People still have a good fan experience. You guys drove in probably over the bridge here to get onto Coronado. It is a pretty narrow passageway. We could have sold more tickets. We cut it off 50,000 people per day. We wanted to make sure the ingress and egress was palatable for a lot of our fans.
Over the last couple days, watching concessions, our bathrooms, some of the different areas, some logjams around some of the bridges. We had all-hands ops meetings every single day. We got everyone together after the event yesterday. Overnight we were making phone calls. We brought in food trucks. Brought in extra staff to help work our bars, our concession stands. In real-time our team was working on areas to continue to improve that fan experience.
Seemed like there had to be wall repair during each race. Was that anticipated? What could be the potential fixes, if anything, for those?
BEN KENNEDY: Unfortunately we did have some wall repairs that we had to go through. What I would say on the flipside of that is the walls held up. They did what they needed to do. Anytime you saw a vehicle go into the wall, push back a bit, which we were expecting and hoping for.
All I can say on that front is we have a team that is always working on making sure that we are operationally ready for moments like that. We had some learnings yesterday. We applied them today. I would say going forward we’re going to make sure we reduce the amount of time to repair those walls as much as we can.
What can’t you not do? We’ve raced in a coliseum, on an active military base. Does this give you the confidence to maybe think really far outside the box? There’s Army bases, Air Force bases.
BEN KENNEDY: If you have any ideas, send them our way. We’ll take any ideas (smiling).
I think that’s the beauty of it. We found a way to create a culture where innovation, we put a lot of energy around it internally at NASCAR and across the industry. That gives us a lot of these different ideas.
I know I’m the one up here, I’m the one that speaks on behalf of NASCAR. I can’t take credit for this idea. I can’t take credit for a lot of the work that went into this. But it’s the people at NASCAR that come up with a lot of these ideas. This was the next evolution of that.
We had the ’21 schedule come out. We went to the first tracks for the first time. ’22 was the next step, went to L.A. Coliseum. We had to build a temporary racetrack. Chicago was probably the boldest evolution of that, building an entirely temporary facility. This is the next iteration.
We’ve heard a lot of great ideas from folks internally, across the industry. Fans on social media every day have different ideas. Every time we have those ideas, we take them to the pipeline, vet them, see if there are any that come to fruition.
I recognized this weekend, I was over to the mini grid, you made this self-contained. Pretty much proof you can do this anywhere. How does this help you plan for the future to know that you can go anywhere?
BEN KENNEDY: It certainly does. We’ve been talking about this entire week. We weren’t really in the street course business four or five years ago. We were in the permanent facility business. That is what a majority of the NASCAR schedule is going to continue to be for a long period of time.
At the same time, street courses, I believe we would have one or two on them for a long period of time in the future of our schedule. You think about a lot of the facilities, a lot of the equipment we bring in over these weekends a lot of them are rented. I think there might be an opportunity for us to partner up with someone, purchase a lot of this equipment.
On self-containment, once we have this, we have a team dedicated to it year-round, people that can pop into different markets two, three years in advance, help us prime that market so when become we have the facility, the equipment, the team, that we can pop in the facility and be ready to go.
Something we’re going to get together after this event and talk about is what does the future look like operationally for us.
Ben, when it comes to putting an event together like this, from where you were at years ago with the Chicago street race, L.A. Coliseum, to now, where is the confidence level at of how far you have come with this mobile setup?
BEN KENNEDY: Confidence is high. Are there areas for improvement? Sure, absolutely. I’m a very detail-oriented person. I’m particular about a lot of things. Everyone on our team are.
I can tell you, when I come to this event, I try to get really comfortable walking shoes. That’s all we do the entire week, walk the grounds, take notes, compare notes at the end of the day, try to make improvements on the fly.
Afterwards, like I said, we’re going to sit down and talk about if we did have another street course race in the future, how do we improve the fan experience, the hospitality.
We moved the driver intros from the start/finish line this time to a separate stage that was done intentionally both to get in front of a lot of new fans that have never been to a NASCAR race before. 67% of people that came this weekend have never been to a race. It’s also an opportunity for us to test out new activations like that that we might be able to apply elsewhere.
I would say the confidence level is high, but all we want to do is win. We want to get better. We want to improve. That’s what the team is focused on for the future, is if we do have our next street course, how do we raise the bar even more.
The majority of drivers have positive feedback, kind of wishing to go back to Mexico City. My question is, what are the chances of NASCAR returning to Mexico City?
BEN KENNEDY: Mexico is a special place for us. Historic weekend. I was having a lot of flashbacks this weekend because it happened to be around the same weekend at this time of year that we went to Mexico City.
It was a tremendous event. Really special for us to go south of the border for the first time in our sport’s history. We mentioned last year we’re taking a pause with everything going on in World Cup this year. Unfortunately we didn’t return to Mexico this year.
What I can tell you is it’s an important market for us, a strategic market that we would love to be in in the future. We have a lot of hungry fans down there. We have drivers like Daniel Suarez that came from our NASCAR Mexico Series that are running in our NASCAR Cup Series right now. Would love nothing more than to return in the future.
Maybe changing the date would be a good thing.
BEN KENNEDY: We’ve talked about that. If we did return, we might look at a different time of year just considering weather. I know the location we went to, they have a lot of different events throughout the year. Also mindful of that depending on where we go.
When you work with the military, this goes off seemingly successful, does it make it easier to go to other military bases?
BEN KENNEDY: Potentially, yeah. Just walking around this weekend, what I was struck by is sports bring people together. It brings all walks of life together. It was really neat to see a lot of folks from the military, from the Navy, be a part of this weekend.
It’s a great unifier for us. It feels authentically NASCAR. I think for that reason, it’s a good validator for us as we talk about other military installations, just brainstorm on it internally. There are so many iconic locations you can go to around the world that would make sense.
I would also say there are a lot of strategic markets that we would love to be in that have military bases, as well. We’ve talked about the Pacific Northwest. We’ve talked about Colorado. We’ve talked about the Northeast. There are a lot of markets across the country we would love to be in that there are large military installations.
Want to be thoughtful and strategic around it. I think a lot of these events do really good for two or three years. Obviously we love to have events that last a lifetime. For a model like this, it could be an opportunity for to us take it to other locations, too.
THE MODERATOR: We talked a little bit about the buzz, the environment, the number of people in the fan zone. Talk to us about admissions, numbers.
BEN KENNEDY: Yes. We had a little over 125,000 people across this weekend. Fans represented across 50 states, 17 different countries. 67% of the people came this weekend had never been to a NASCAR race.
11% higher for female attendees compared to other NASCAR events. Three times the amount of Hispanic audience we had compared to other NASCAR events.
You think about a lot of the strategic reasons that we invest in events like this. We want to put these amazing races on. Obviously this weekend was all about our military and honoring them and thanking them for all that they do. We also welcomed a lot of new fans this weekend, which is icing on the cake.
THE MODERATOR: Thanks.
BEN KENNEDY: Thank you all.
— NASCAR —