NASCAR Chicago Street Race
With the success of our custom designed 9 hole mini golf rentals for the Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR contacted us to design a 9 hole experience for their Chicago Street Race that was to be held over Independence Day weekend. At Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR is able to control the logistics; at the Chicago Street Race that would not be the course as the track is literally around the streets of Chicago and the mini golf experience would be installed on a lawn area near Turn 3. Since the race would start on Saturday the 5th of July, our course had to be installed on the 3rd of July with Friday, July 4th being the holiday. Additionally, the track itself would present many street closures in the heart of Chicago so we had to be at our designated spot early morning on the 3rd as finishing work to the race track would block our access later in the day.
Besides the challenging logistics, it was expressly communicated to us that the course had to have several branded & unique Chicago elements to it along with matching what we had created at the Daytona International Speedway mini golf experiences in 2024 & 2025. With the objectives clearly detailed to us, our course designers along with our operations team began the process of creating the course while keeping in mind the logistics that we would be encountering for load in and load out. Additionally, the area where the mini golf course would be installed was at Turn 11 and we had to be mindful of the spacing between the holes for attendees to safely walk through if they were not stopping to play mini golf.
The course that was created hit all of the objectives of NASCAR and then some. For the Chicago elements, we created 9 branded flags that had the NASCAR Chicago Street Race logo along with famous landmarks and street names. Other Chicago branding included hanging Chicago Style Hot Dogs for participants to putt under and these were authentic Chicago Style Hot Dogs including a poppy seed bun, yellow mustard, green relish, tomato slices and pickled sport peppers.
The NASCAR obstacles included hanging tires to putt around and under and for this course we installed authentic Goodyear tires to putt under on the way to the individual holes. Other branded obstacles included a crown situated around a cup with three openings and for the 9th hole, a Skeeball hole with three targets collected the final putts on the course.
The terrain of the individual holes was both entertaining and challenging for players. The terrain included roughs, straddles, undulating fairways as well as traps with rocks and traps with miniature NASCAR cars as part of the hazards. On the hole where the miniature NASCAR cars were part of two traps, those players who were successfully able to obtain a hole in one on this challenging hole got their pick of what famous miniature NASCAR car to take home with them.
This mini golf activation also was the debut of gray turf instead of all green. Four of the holes had gray turf which looked like asphalt from a NASCAR track. One of the 4 holes that had the gray turf was our newly created NASCAR hole that had two elevations with curved turns for the putts. This impressive hole which also had branded turf logos was a challenging par 4 and was one of the most popular holes on the course.
Over the course of two days including the main race day nearly 1,000 people played the NASCAR Chicago Street Race Mini Golf Experience. Besides the people that played, there were hundreds of social media posts from happy NASCAR fans about their mini golf scores on the course. NASCAR was pleased with the throughput, the course design as well as the unique branding & customization that we created.
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