NASCAR will return to Austin’s Circuit of the Americas for fifth straight year in 2025

Despite demands on its ambitious schedule, the NASCAR Cup Series will return to Circuit of the Americas in 2025 for the fifth consecutive year, in addition to making its debut in Mexico City.

NASCAR will ride into Austin earlier than ever, with the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix on March 2. NASCAR’s first visit to COTA was in late May 2021. Since then race weekend has been in late March. Now it will be the third regular-season event, after the Daytona 500 on Feb. 16 and Atlanta on Feb. 23.

The Texas Motor Speedway race was moved back from early April to May 4, creating a two-month separation. This year the gap was just three weeks. 

“Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth are destination markets for NASCAR fans from across the country and around the world,” Speedway Motorsports CEO Marcus Smith said Thursday. “This new schedule allows fans to have more convenient dates to plan vacation time. 

“We received a lot of feedback earlier this year from fans who said they’d like to attend both races, but they were just too closely bunched together on the calendar. This schedule is more accommodating for our Texas tracks.” 

Race organizers are calling it the Texas Two-Step, and anyone who buys a ticket to one race will get a 20% discount to the other.

The Austin weekend will include an Xfinity Series race, the Focused Health 250, on Saturday. While the NASCAR truck series will skip COTA in ’25, the weekend will include the COTA debut of the IMSA-sanctioned VP Racing SportsCar Challenge. There will be a pair of 45-minute sprint races with exotic prototype sports cars racing GT-style cars.

Speedway Motorsports, which owns TMS outside of Fort Worth, has a lease with COTA Chairman Bobby Epstein to rent the facility for the weekend.

Mexico City will be new territory for the Cup Series. The June 15 event on the Formula One track will be the top-level series’ first international venture since July 1958.

“It’s no secret we’ve been bullish about growing NASCAR beyond our borders, and this will be an important first milestone,” Ben Kennedy, NASCAR’s executive vice president said.

The ’25 schedule will have 38 races, 36 of them points events. The Chicago street race will be back July 6, and reports indicate NASCAR wants to explore more street courses for 2026 and beyond.

Meanwhile, Circuit of the Americas will stay busy with the Lone Star Le Mans, a World Endurance Challenge event, this Labor Day weekend. There will be support racing Friday and Saturday, with the main event from 1 to 7 p.m. Sunday. About a dozen music acts are booked over the three days. Tickets start at $69 for the weekend. F1’s United States Grand Prix will be Oct. 20.

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This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: NASCAR returns to Circuit of the Americas in 2025