Chicagoland Speedway, a 1.5-mile oval in Joliet, Illinois, held a NASCAR race every season from 2001 through 2019. Then it held nothing at all for six years. On Saturday the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series comes back with the Cuervo 300, the track's 25th series race and its first since June 2019. The series' own media notes put the gap at 2,562 days. Nobody counts the days unless the number is doing work.
Here is what six years does to a garage area. Nine of the series' current full-time teams did not exist the last time it raced here. Haas Factory Team, Viking Motorsports, Big Machine Racing, Alpha Prime Racing: none of them existed when Chicagoland last had a date.
Where was everybody? Downtown, for part of it. No NASCAR series ran at Chicagoland from 2020 through 2025. From 2023 through 2025, the sport raced through the streets of Chicago instead. For 2026 the schedule sends everyone back to Joliet, and the street race is slated to return in 2027. Whatever the sport is looking for in Chicago, it has now looked in two places. The return also lands mid-gauntlet: Chicagoland is the fourth stop in a five-week summer run that goes Pocono, San Diego, Sonoma, Chicagoland, Atlanta, five races on five different track shapes.
Three drivers in Saturday's field have won at Chicagoland: Justin Allgaier, twice; Chase Elliott; and Cole Custer, who won the most recent race here in June 2019 driving for Stewart-Haas Racing. Custer returns in the SS GreenLight Racing No. 0. He has three career O'Reilly Series starts at Chicagoland and has never finished worse than seventh. Seven years later, he is still the defending winner. Nobody has been able to take that from him, mostly because nobody has been allowed to try.
Allgaier, in the No. 7 JR Motorsports entry, arrives with the least suspenseful part of the weekend already decided. He has five wins this season, tied for his career best, and a Chase spot he clinched three weeks ago at Pocono. His points lead is 207, which is larger than the gap between second place and 15th. He leads the series in wins, top twos, top fives, average finish and stage wins, and he has two Chicagoland wins in 12 starts. The wire notes ask, in an actual section header, "Is Justin Allgaier Mr. O'Reilly Auto Parts Series?" and then answer with a table. The table says yes.
Connor Zilisch, back in the JR Motorsports No. 1, wins 30 percent of the races he enters. Thirteen wins in 43 starts, the best career win rate in series history among drivers with more than three starts, ahead of Kyle Busch. The record has exactly one hole, and it is shaped like this racetrack: in 10 career starts on 1.5-mile ovals, Zilisch has zero wins, three second-place finishes and seven top 10s. It is the only track type he has not won on. Saturday is also his first start at Chicagoland in any series.
Carson Kvapil gets the JR Motorsports No. 9 this week, the same car Shane van Gisbergen drove to the win at Sonoma. That makes Chicagoland the third race this season in which Kvapil climbs into the previous race's winning car. The first two attempts produced a 37th at Kansas and a seventh at Dover. He arrives on a career-best six-race top-10 streak, spread across three different cars, and Chicagoland will be his tenth consecutive race without driving the same car twice in a row. He has four second-place finishes and no wins in 61 career starts. In the wire's table tracking this pattern, the Chicagoland column reads "???", which is both a placeholder and the most honest data point in the document.
Chase Elliott makes his first O'Reilly Series start of the season in the JR Motorsports No. 88, the first of two scheduled, with Indianapolis to follow. Do not mistake the cameo for rust: he has finished in the top 10 in his last 10 series starts, six of them top 5s, he won at Chicagoland in July 2014, and he has never finished worse than 14th here in five starts. The seat comes with arithmetic attached. Rajah Caruth, who has split the No. 88 this season, sits 26 points below the Chase cutline and does not race this weekend or at Indianapolis. In the No. 88, Caruth has gained 14 points on the cut this year. In the Jordan Anderson Racing No. 32, he has lost 40. The math is not subtle.
The rest of the season-long ledger reads like a rout. JR Motorsports has 12 wins through 19 races, the second-most by any team through 19 races in series history, and 55 top 10s, the most ever at this point in a season. Chevrolet has won 17 of 19 races, including the last nine in a row. And no race in 2026 has gone to overtime, the longest a season has ever opened without one. For the record, only two of the 24 series races at Chicagoland ever have.
One genuine debut: Team Stange Racing, a Chicago-based operation, enters the No. 47 in partnership with Mike Harmon Racing for its first NASCAR start. The team ran ARCA in the mid-2010s and finished 22nd in the 2019 Indianapolis 500 with Oriol Servia. The wire notes specify the name is pronounced "Stang, like Mustang." Consider yourself briefed.
The essentials: green flag Saturday at 5:30 p.m. ET, television on The CW from 4:30, radio on MRN and SiriusXM Channel 90. Two hundred laps, 300 miles, stage breaks at laps 45 and 90, a purse of $1,661,806. Cuervo Tequila holds the race entitlement, the weekend doubles as an America250 Independence Day celebration, and the fan zone will serve something called the World's Fastest Margarita. The Cup Series follows Sunday with the eero 400, its own first visit since 2019.
The track never moved. The schedule did. On Saturday, after 2,562 days, they meet again.