Ahead of Busch Light Clash at L.A. Coliseum, a history of unusual NASCAR venues

«The Colosseum. Oh, you should see the Colosseum… Fifty-thousand Romans. Watching every movement of your sword. Willing you to make that killer blow. The silence before you strike. And the noise afterwards. It rises. It rises up like… like a storm. As if you were the thunder god himself.»

— Proximo to Maximus, Rome (from «Gladiator»)

«A baseball field. They raced on a baseball field. You should have seen that baseball field. My daddy crashed into a dugout.»

— Richard Petty to Ryan McGee, Randleman, North Carolina

There has been, will be and should be much buzz about this weekend's Busch Light Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The format of the event will be old-school short-track stock car cool, with single-car qualifying and heat races on Saturday, followed by a last-chance qualifier and the main event — a 23-car, 150-lap cage match — on Sunday.

It will be held on a quarter-mile asphalt bullring constructed atop the playing field that is normally the home of the USC Trojans, wrapped in 77,500 recently refurbished seats that have witnessed a World Series, Super Bowl I and a pair of Summer Olympics (with another slated for 2028), not to mention the X Games, the Monsters of Rock tour and the Lingerie Bowl.

Now the Coliseum will become the 16th facility in California and the seventh in SoCal to host NASCAR's premier series. That's right, seven places in the greater Los Angeles area have been invaded by the various iterations of the Cup Series since Carrell Speedway, aka the Gardena Bowl, hosted the fourth event of NASCAR's third-ever Strictly Stock (now Cup) Series season. Unlike Sunday's exhibition, those others were all real points-paying, regular-season races, run during seasons packed with 40, 50, even 60