NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace stands on a race car on July 19, 2022, after driving through Grant Park following Mayor Lori Lightfoot's announcement that the city will host a NASCAR street race next year. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Imagine cars racing down Lake Shore Drive at 130 mph, burning rubber on South Michigan Avenue and jockeying for position bumper-to-bumper on Balbo Drive. Welcome to the new rush hour in Chicago.

The city announced Tuesday it will transform the Grant Park environs into the first-ever NASCAR street race for a weekend next summer. The televised Cup Series event will feature a 12-turn, 2.2-mile course, with top NASCAR drivers weaving through the park on closed-off streets lined with temporary fences, grandstands and what promoters hope will be thousands of fans.

“This is actually going to be our first race on a street course in our 75-year history,” said Ben Kennedy, NASCAR’s senior vice president of racing development and strategy. “I think it’s going to be a very unique course.”

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, left, greets NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace at Cityfront Plaza in Chicago on July 19, 2022, during a press event to announce that NASCAR will hold races on the streets of downtown Chicago over the next several years. Wallace's racing team is funded by former Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

The NASCAR race is set to take place on Sunday, July 2, with plans for a separate sports car race scheduled for July 1. The Chicago Street Race will also feature music and entertainment in an effort to attract attendees to Grant Park and much-needed hospitality and tourism revenue to the city.

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NASCAR, which is promoting the event, selling the tickets and building the track, will pay rental fees to the Chicago Park District for the use of Grant Park, but terms of the three-year agreement with the city were not disclosed.

“I think it’s going to be one of the most iconic racecourses maybe ever, and introduce a whole new fan base to what NASCAR is about in the city of Chicago,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said at a news conference Tuesday. “The opportunity to really ignite our tourism with a new iconic event on the calendar was a no-miss opportunity.”

While the street course has been tested in simulations, the proposed length of the race has yet to be determined, Kennedy said.

The Chicago Street Race is slated to be one of 36 events in the NASCAR Cup Series, which stretches from February to November and includes such well-known races as the Daytona 500 and newcomers such the Enjoy Illinois 300, which held its first NASCAR event last month at a track just outside St. Louis.

Most NASCAR tracks range from a quarter-mile to 2 ½-mile banked ovals, but the Florida-based sanctioning body for stock car racing holds several events at road courses, including Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, which hosted a Cup Series race July 3. That track will be bumped from the NASCAR Cup Series next summer to make way for the Chicago event.

The proposed Chicago course will start on Columbus Drive in front of Buckingham Fountain, an area that will also serve as pit road. From there, drivers will go south to Balbo Drive and then jog east toward Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Heading south along the lake, drivers will turn west on Roosevelt Road, working back north on Columbus Drive in a rough figure eight that will take in a piece of South Michigan Avenue before reaching the start/finish line.

NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace takes his race car on a tour of downtown Chicago on July 19, 2022, after it was announced that the city will host the first NASCAR street race in Chicago in 2023. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s car, foreground, is seen at Cityfront Plaza in Chicago on July 19, 2022, before a press conference where it was announced that the city will host the first NASCAR street race in Chicago in 2023. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

Chase Elliott, Ryan Blaney, Daniel Suárez and other top NASCAR drivers are expected to compete in Chicago. Their race cars, which can hit 200 miles per hour, will likely top out at a much lower speed on the Chicago street course, Kennedy said.

“We’re still running simulations to figure that out,” Kennedy said. “I would guess in the neighborhood of 120-plus or so at top speed. And then on the low end, we’ll probably be similar to the speed of cars going around Grant Park right now.”

The streets will be closed to traffic for an indeterminate length of time before, during and after the race, Kennedy said.

While barriers will be erected to keep drivers and spectators safe, the extent of the street closings during the race has not been disclosed.

“We’re going to try to leave a majority of the streets open as long as we can,” Kennedy said. “A lot of the construction will only happen overnight. So the walls and fencing will kind of go in probably down the streets ahead of time. And then they’ll wait until the last minute to close off the corners.”

The most dangerous lap may well have taken place Tuesday afternoon, when NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace navigated the course in real Chicago traffic, led by a police escort.

Wallace, who drives the No. 23 Toyota Camry for a racing team headed by former Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan, is the only Black driver in the NASCAR Cup Series. Reaching a new audience in Chicago could help broaden the NASCAR fan base, he said Tuesday.

“I think exposing the sport to this area, downtown, with so much to do around while the race is going on, is super important,” Wallace said. “So you’re going to get that next Bubba Wallace that’s sitting in the stands like I was when I was 9 years old (saying), ‘I want to do this one day, but I want to be better.’ And I’m going to tell him good luck.”

This is not the first NASCAR race to be held in Chicago, nor the first time the city aspired to turn Lake Shore Drive into a racecourse.

Soldier Field hosted a NASCAR Cup Series race in July 1956. A quarter century later, an ambitious plan by then-Mayor Jane Byrne to hold a Formula One race on Lake Shore Drive in the summer of 1981 never made it to the starting line.

This time, the course will stay north of Soldier Field and south of the infamous S-curve on DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

The Chicago area has been home to the NASCAR circuit in recent years, with Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet track hosting a number of races since opening in 2001. But the 1.5-mile oval has essentially been idled since it was acquired in 2019 by NASCAR as part of a $2 billion merger agreement with International Speedway Corp.

Most recently, the track has been used as a parking lot for thousands of Ford SUVs built at the Chicago Assembly Plant and awaiting computer chips during the ongoing global semiconductor shortage that has disrupted auto production.

Kennedy said NASCAR will bring racing back to Chicagoland Speedway at some point, but declined to give a specific timeline.

NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace drives through Grant Park on July 19, 2022, after Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the city will host a NASCAR street race next year. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Chicago tourism has been hard hit and slow to recover from the pandemic, with the city hosting 30.7 million visitors last year, up 86% over 2020, but still far below pre-pandemic years, when the city regularly welcomed more than 50 million visitors annually. Hotel occupancy has picked up this summer, and the city is hoping to see tourism return to pre-pandemic levels by 2024.

Major events such as the NFL Draft and the Lollapalooza summer music festival, which is held annually in Grant Park, can significantly boost tourism numbers and bring millions of dollars in economic impact to the city. Whether holding a NASCAR race on city streets around Grant Park does the same remains to be seen.

“I’d be lying to say that this wasn’t a big risk, but at the same time, a big opportunity as well,” Kennedy said. “Being on NBC on July Fourth weekend, just the backdrop and optics of downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan, it’s going to be certainly a spectacle for us next year.”