“Restore Our Fairground” Coalition Forms Petition To End Auto-Racing At Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway

Some Nashville-area residents don’t want NASCAR-style racing to ever return to the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.

Fans of NASCAR know how big of a deal it was for the sport to return to Music City. The stock car auto racing organization went over a decade without hosting race in Nashville, Tennessee before they returned in 2021 with a Cup Series race at the  Nashville Superspeedway.

As far as racetracks in Nashville, the Superspeedway in Lebanon is longer, coming in at 1.33 miles. The shorter (and more historic) half-mile track that used to host NASCAR races is located at the Nashville Fairgrounds.

There’s been rumblings of NASCAR returning to the Nashville Fairground ever since former Mayor John Cooper announced in 2021 that the city had signed a letter of intent with Bristol Motor Speedway to renovate the Fairgrounds Speedway, which hasn’t hosted a NASCAR Cup Series race since 1984.

Evidently, that’s still been a work in progress – or maybe even a work in limbo – all of these years later.

And now, the whole plan to restore the Nashville Speedway at the Fairgrounds is ironically being challenged by a coalition that’s called “Restore Our Fairgrounds.” You’d think with a name like that, they’d be on board with bringing the racetrack back to it’s former glory. But the Nashville coalition actually has other plans for the Nashville Speedway… and it involves repurposing the whole thing.

It was early in December of 2025 that the group submitted a petition to the city’s charter revision commission aiming to remove racing as a use of the property altogether. They are proposing that racing be done at the Nashville Superspeedway, and the Nashville Speedway location at the Fairgrounds to be reimagined with affordable housing, green space, and protections for the nearby Brown Creek.

In other words, there’s a large group of people that don’t want NASCAR-style racing to return to the historic track. And even the current mayor (Freddie O’Connell) has kept the project at bay.

Which is odd, considering the momentum was really rolling when the city of Nashville and Bristol Motor Speedway reached an agreement on a proposal to renovate Fairgrounds Speedway and bring NASCAR Cup Series racing back to the track back in 2021. Under the agreement, Bristol was set to lease the speedway from the city, thus managing and operating the facility (and agreeing to do so for 30 years).

And that plan even had residents that weren’t so excited about racing returning to the Fairgrounds Speedway in mind. The track was supposed to install state-of-the-art sound mitigation components in order to reduce noise for surrounding residents. The Speedway was also set to limit track practice rentals to 20 days per year in an attempt to address concerns from locals about the potential for noise from the track.

But as of early 2026, nothing has really happened at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.

The Restore Our Fairgrounds coalition has to collect a multitude of signatures from registered voters to even get their amendment to eliminate auto racing on the ballot for November 2026. That could be a tall task, especially considering that many Nashville residents are for the racetrack being renovated and continuing to be used for racing purposes.

However, if the petition is successful, and then the amendment is voted through, the Fairgrounds Speedway in Nashville would remain a memory, and a thought of what could have been: