B-52 Hangar MX

B-52 Hangar MX has closed. After five incredible seasons, the Village of Rantoul sold the hangar building, and the indoor track will not be reopening.

The team behind the hangar is not done with motocross. They are moving to the Champaign County Fairgrounds in Urbana, with plans for more night races and weekend events that take advantage of the fairgrounds' facilities, including 70 RV campsites with hookups. The annual Champaign County Fair race returns there in 2026 on a new night, racing Friday, July 31, instead of Thursday.

The operators have thanked every rider, family, spectator, sponsor, volunteer, and staff member from five unforgettable seasons, along with the Village of Rantoul for taking a chance on a pretty wild idea. The memories and friendships built at the hangar will last for years.

The record of what the hangar was follows.

B-52 Hangar MX in Rantoul, Illinois was Illinois' only indoor motocross track. The qualifier matters. American indoor motocross is rare. Most U.S. motocross is outdoor, with the major exception of stadium supercross rounds that are also outdoor at the stadium level. A dedicated indoor practice facility on the scale of B-52 Hangar MX was genuinely unusual.

The property was built inside a decommissioned B-52 hangar at the former Chanute Air Force Base. The hangar itself is more than 200,000 square feet. That kind of indoor square footage is what made the operation possible. Smaller indoor spaces cannot accommodate a full-scale motocross or supercross track. The B-52 hangar's original purpose, sheltering the Stratofortress bombers that defined Cold War-era American airpower, left behind a structure with the dimensions that modern motocross needs.

The track itself was a 10-lane, 20-foot-wide supercross-style replica layout. The SX-spec design meant riders practiced the same kind of rhythm sections, whoops, and triples that drive Saturday-night Monster Energy Supercross results. Most regional outdoor MX facilities cannot produce SX-spec layouts because the obstacles require dedicated infrastructure and prep that does not survive multi-discipline use. The B-52 indoor operation was built specifically for the SX format.

The dirt was a specialist indoor mix optimized for the climate-controlled environment. Indoor dirt is a real engineering challenge. Outdoor soil shifts with weather, humidity, and temperature in ways that climate-controlled indoor spaces eliminate, which means the indoor mix had to deliver consistent surface characteristics across the entire ride day. The B-52 mix was developed for that operating context.

Climate control was the property's other defining feature. Year-round riding when every other Midwest track is shut down for winter was the operational reality. December, January, and February motocross is impossible at outdoor Midwest tracks. B-52 Hangar MX ran through the entire calendar.

Full LED lighting and a climate-controlled pit area completed the facility infrastructure. The pit area's climate control mattered for rider comfort during the cold-weather operating months and for bike maintenance that did not have to fight outdoor temperatures.

The Rantoul location is in Champaign County, central Illinois, near the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The former Chanute Air Force Base property is in the broader Rantoul area, and the indoor facility benefited from the broader infrastructure that the decommissioned base left behind. Chicago is about two hours north on Interstate 57. Indianapolis is two hours east. St. Louis is about three hours southwest.

For five seasons, B-52 Hangar MX was the only year-round indoor option in Illinois. The decommissioned Air Force hangar as a motocross facility is its own kind of American story.