"For the last 15 years, they’ve done everything wrong" - Former NASCAR driver says the sport has been having a 'clusterf**k'

Former NASCAR driver and 9-times Xfinity Series winner Kenny Wallace is the type of person who speaks his mind. Since retiring from the sport in 2015, Wallace has been a follower and critic of the sport. The 58-year-old is also an avid YouTuber with over 25,000 subscribers.

Wallace is a St. Louis, Missouri-native, which is a stone's throw away from the World Wide Technology Raceway, situated on the other side of the Missouri State line. The Cup Series, which visited the track for the very first time, came with the motivation and appeal of having the former driver as a guest analyst and in the FOX Broadcast Booth for the 300-mile-long Enjoy Illinois 300 presented by TicketSmarter.

The controversial and no-holds-barred nature of Wallace shone through even before the weekend started as he joined Jeff Gluck of The Athletic for a short interview. Gluck asked Wallace about his thoughts on the future of NASCAR, to which the Missouri native replied in typical fashion, saying:

“What I’m most optimistic about is they’ll find their way back to acceptance, in other words, where the story won’t be everything they’re doing wrong. For the last 15 years, they’ve done everything wrong, they built that track in Chicago. Wrong. They built that track in Kentucky and they mess(ed) it up. Wrong. They left Wilkesboro. They left Rockingham.”

Wallace also felt that the blind chase after numbers did not make the sport great as he went on to elaborate, saying:

“Now we realize there’s nothing wrong with 60,000 people in the grandstands and a great TV rating. We used to think the more the merrier. We thought it was awesome when there were 250,000 people every single week. And it was a clusterf**k. People couldn’t get in and out of the racetracks.”

Not everyone needs to agree with these opinions, however, they sure do help the sport's PR, for better or for worse.

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Kenny Wallace's thoughts on NASCAR's old tracks aren't completely baseless

One might not echo Kenny Wallace's thoughts completely, but he did hit some nails on the head.

The Chicago Motor Speedway was a track that proved to be a money-losing investment for NASCAR since its inception in 1999. It was shut down after hosting Camping World Truck Series races for a couple of years. The North Wilkesboro Speedway and Rockingham Speedway are tracks from the old days of 1949 and 1965. Both have seen neglect and disuse over recent years, with NASCAR moving its concentration of tracks away from the country's south to appeal to a larger audience.