Gateway Motorsports Park
Illinois
Just across the Mississippi from St. Louis sits one of the Midwest's surprise racing venues. The property started as a drag strip in nineteen sixty-seven, then expanded into an oval and road course by the nineties.
The track officially opened to major-league racing in nineteen ninety-seven, hosting its first CART IndyCar event just one day before the Indianapolis Five Hundred. It changed hands, closed briefly in twenty ten, and was rescued days before demolition by St. Louis developer Curtis Francois in twenty eleven.
A naming-rights deal with World Wide Technology arrived in twenty nineteen, and in twenty twenty-two the track finally landed its first NASCAR Cup Series race, putting a ribbon on a fifty-year journey from a quarter-mile drag strip to a nationally televised oval.
