NASCAR's return to Nashville makes too much sense not to happen | Estes

On Monday night, NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch won in Nashville.

Racetrack? Nah. Ringside.

At the WWE Raw event at Bridgestone Arena, Busch briefly became the sport’s 24/7 champion, a coup that included the assistance of Michael Waltrip in referee’s garb.

(I won’t — or can’t, really — delve into the particulars of this, but it was gripping theater.)

Does it say something about the sports landscape of this city that for all the athletes that could have been included — the Titans and Predators had players in attendance — the WWE went with a NASCAR driver for a celebrity cameo on its visit to Nashville?

In terms of reputation and sporting past, Music City is often linked to NASCAR despite a glaring deficiency: The lack of an actual top-tier NASCAR event since the 1980s.

But this week, NASCAR is indeed back in town, which does mean something.

Racetrack? Well, no. Banquet.

The NASCAR Cup Awards will be Thursday night at Music City Center, bringing other events to the city along with top drivers like Busch.

The decision by NASCAR to move its champions gala event to Nashville this year (and next) was perhaps a hint that the organization might be interested in Middle Tennessee as a racing destination.

In the past year, that pursuit has picked up steam. It has progressed from far more than speculation, most notably with a proposal in May by Speedway Motorsports for a $60 million renovation of the Fairgrounds Speedway Nashville in order to bring big-league racing back to a venerable track that remains a favorite of drivers.

"You're not going to find a short track or race track this cool, this size, that close to a major city like this,” Chase Elliott said during a summer promotional stop in Nashville. “That’s a missing piece in speedways across America.

“That’s something you have right here, so why don't we use it?"

Good question, and it’s a complicated topic, dating back to the 1980s and a relationship that deteriorated to the point that a NASCAR public relations director, Chip Williams, once uttered a memorable line: “Nashville will get a Winston Cup race when Vanderbilt plays in the Sugar Bowl.”

(For the record, the Commodores have played in six bowl games in the past dozen years. No Sugar Bowl, though.)

All the reasons NASCAR and Nashville split up and have remained that way, they don't really matter now. The larger point is that it appears to finally be changing.

It just makes too much sense for NASCAR to return to Nashville in some form in the coming years.

For one, these aren't great times for NASCAR's perceived popularity. Its declining attendance has been well-documented. Racing is far from the only sport struggling to convince people to buy tickets and show up, but when the majority of seats at a massive racetrack aren’t full, it’s an especially terrible look on television when cars speed past them repeatedly.

Even NASCAR's stalwart sites like Bristol are dealing with it.

"When it gets to the point where enough people don’t want to go to a race at Bristol that they have to shut half the seats, it is a sign that the decline in interest is virtually irreversible," wrote Dave Caldwell earlier this year for Forbes.

As seats are being reduced, NASCAR has every reason to revisit and refresh its Cup Series schedule before 2021, taking a good, long look at some tracks with waning interest, especially those sites that are hosting more than one race each year.

In doing so, why wouldn’t NASCAR want to return to its roots, so to speak, and explore a market like Nashville that has a strong history and interest in the sport and is also hungry for big-time racing?

On Nashville’s end, a lot obviously has to be ironed out, especially as it pertains to logistics and a venue.

The Nashville Superspeedway gathering dust near Lebanon doesn’t appear to be a viable option, for a number of reasons.

And whether the Fairgrounds track — even with proposed renovations at the site (and don't forget that those could be complicated by the new soccer stadium for Nashville’s MLS team) — could be a realistic choice for an actual Cup Series race is unclear.

But even small steps would be significant.

Even an Xfinity race there would be a big deal, so much that retired star Dale Earnhardt Jr. told The Tennessean’s Mike Organ on Tuesday that he’d be eager to return to race in an Xfinity event at the Fairgrounds during the next four or five years.

"It's a great place for us to be racing,” Earnhardt said, “and we should be racing there."

Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.