NASCAR at Naval Base Coronado Was Weirdly Great. But the Format Is Broken.

NASCAR just held a race on an active military installation. That alone should tell you something weird—and kind of awesome—is happening in American motorsports. The Anduril 250 at Naval Base Coronado last weekend was a fever dream mashup of Navy ceremonial pageantry, drone technology displays, and road-course racing wedged onto the access roads of a functioning aircraft carrier base across the bay from San Diego. It shouldn’t have worked. Parts of it didn’t. But the parts that worked were genuinely excellent.

What Made Coronado Special

First, the spectacle. A pair of F-35s and two F/A-18s screaming over the grandstands in formation, led by an E-2 Hawkeye. Sailors in dress whites everywhere, actually engaged and enthusiastic. A corner framed by the docked USS Carl Vinson—one of the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. These are not things you see at most racing venues, and they matter. Motorsports has deep roots partnering with the military for events; the Strategic Air Command even hosted racing events during the Cold War. Coronado felt like that heritage actually meant something again.

The civilian experience was solid too. No press badging required—just a regular person in the grandstands with a free hat, watching cars lap a 3.4-mile, 16-turn circuit. The food lines moved. The vendor areas had breathing room. And the logistics of hosting a race on a military base actually worked without the usual chaos that plagues temporary street circuits. The Navy wasn’t treating this like an inconvenience; they were treating it like a demonstration of capability.

Then there’s the driver angle. Shane van Gisbergen showed up—the New Zealand road-course savant who drives like his nervous system has been specially engineered for racing. His ability to find grip and momentum through corners is genuinely freakish. He qualified on the pole, which felt inevitable. For about 32 laps, the race was exactly what you’d hope to see from a world-class driver on a technical course. And then a clusterfuck happened, the kind that only temp circuits can create.

The Fundamental Problem With Temporary Circuits

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you couldn’t see the race. The writer attended as a civilian spectator in the front-stretch grandstands and could view roughly half a mile of track before the course disappeared into turn one. The rest? Hidden behind the buildings and structures that make Naval Base Coronado an actual functioning military installation. Those same structures also swallowed the engine noise—the back part of the lap ran eerily silent from the stands. This isn’t new. It’s the eternal curse of street circuits and improvised courses.

Van Gisbergen’s crash on lap 32 exemplified the problem. A dive-bomb pass that would barely register on a full-width circuit like Circuit of the Americas became a catastrophic jam-up because Coronado’s racing lanes are skinny. One car slightly out of place isn’t a racing incident—it’s a wreck. The weekend’s support race (the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series) took over 40 minutes to clear a similar crash. And the main event dragged on for four hours and 36 minutes for just 75 laps. That’s not entertainment; that’s endurance.

This problem isn’t unique to Coronado. The Monaco Grand Prix has been fought with this exact constraint for nearly a century. Formula One’s stints in Detroit and Phoenix were brutal spectator experiences. Even the current Las Vegas Grand Prix, despite its glitz and $500 million investment, forces viewers to watch on screens because most of the track is invisible from the stands. Temporary circuits are almost always worse for live spectators than permanent road courses—narrower, louder, more chaotic, and harder to see.

How to Actually Fix This

NASCAR’s chief operating officer Ben Kennedy appears open to feedback, which is refreshing. And if there’s a next Coronado race, a few changes would transform it from “neat concept, tough viewing” to “must-attend event.” First: shorten the circuit. A shorter lap would keep more of the action visible to stands-based fans and reduce the dead space behind buildings. Second: run it to time, not laps. Call it the Three Hours of Coronado and make it an actual endurance race. That completely changes strategy, pit timing, and tire management—it’s a more interesting format than grinding through 75 laps in nearly five hours. Third: fix the racing surface consistency. And fourth, somehow widen the track. None of these are easy on a military base, but they’re not impossible either.

Long Beach has been running for 50 years and has figured out how to work within similar constraints. It’s still tough to see the entire race from any single vantage point, but it’s manageable. And Long Beach has built a city around the event—it’s become a Southern California institution. Coronado could get there, but only if NASCAR and the Navy invest in the fundamentals of track design rather than just the spectacle.

The Bigger Picture

What’s genuinely encouraging here is that motorsports is still experimenting. NASCAR could have played it safe and stuck exclusively to purpose-built ovals and the same road courses it’s been using for years. Instead, it took a swing at something completely different—a race on an active military base, in partnership with a defense contractor, featuring cutting-edge Navy aircraft and drone technology. That’s not boring. It’s the kind of creative thinking the sport needs.

The military heritage angle matters too. Racing and the armed forces have a long, complicated history—from generals in go-karts to sports cars lined up with Navy jets in vintage magazine spreads. That connection has faded from modern motorsports. Bringing it back, even in an imperfect first attempt, feels like recovering something important.

Corey Heim won the race. Van Gisbergen finished 38th. In a few weeks, NASCAR heads to Sonoma for another road course, and van Gisbergen is expected to dominate. But the real story from Coronado isn’t the finishing order—it’s that NASCAR tried something genuinely different, nailed about 70 percent of it, and identified exactly what needs fixing for version 2.0. That’s how you build something special. That’s also how you admit that not every idea works perfectly on the first swing. Coronado was weird, it was worth attending, and it could absolutely be better. The foundation is there.

Sources: Road & Track