A couple of years ago, looking for a change for its season-opening exhibition race, NASCAR took it to the Los Angeles Coliseum, constructing, at great expense and with great fanfare, a quarter-mile short track inside the stadium.
It was a genuine attempt by NASCAR to return to the kind of short track its fans wanted while exploring what it hoped was a new, untapped market. It just never quite worked.
The crowd NASCAR was hoping would embrace the sport never really did. The stands weren’t empty, but they weren’t packed either, and much of the crowd at those races seemed apathetic; there for the novelty but never really understood what it was all about. It was reminiscent of middle school with an outsider trying to win their way into the popular crowd by giving them trinkets and trying to join their conversations, sometimes tolerated but never really wanted.
After a couple of tries, NASCAR did an about face moving the Clash to Bowman Gray Stadium. Bowman Gray is exactly what NASCAR was trying to build in the Coliseum; a quarter-mile oval where you’d expect a running track, ringing the Winston-Salem State football field. Bowman Gray isn’t fancy, and it wasn’t built to woo a market.
It didn’t have to woo anyone.
The stands were packed, and they were packed with knowledgeable, enthusiastic race fans. Fans who cheered and booed and gave the finger authentically. Many of them were the same fans who pack those same stands every Saturday night from spring until fall when the football team supplants the racecars for the season.
If NASCAR went to LA to try and break into a clique that didn’t really want it, returning to Bowman Gray after more than five decades was coming home to the people who loved it all along.
It’s not very far up Highway 421 to North Wilkesboro Speedway from Winston-Salem. Unlike Bowman Gray, which hosts a raucous crowd every week, North Wilkesboro Speedway was quietly returning to the earth, the roar of engines a distant echo. Unwanted even by its owners, the half-mile speedway languished, rolls of hay sitting where teams once worked on their cars after the races went to other tracks.
And then, a glimmer of hope as owner Marcus Smith told fans that the track wasn’t forgotten. Still, after all those years, did they dare hope? Could the track rise from the ashes and the engines echo across the hills? Surely it was too far gone; perhaps the best they could hope for was any racetrack on that spot after the old girl was razed and rebuilt, but the racetrack was all but done for.
A year later, the NASCAR Cup Series came back.
Drivers who had watched another generation of heroes race on North Wilkesboro’s surface raced on it themselves. The All-Star event returns in May for a third time.
A few hours down the road, Rockingham Speedway also rises from its dormancy this year, hosting the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and NASCAR Xfinity Series on its mile-long oval in North Carolina’s sand hills. It wasn’t long ago that the speedway’s land was being eyed for a shopping center or perhaps a housing development or somewhere people would go about their lives unaware of the history under their feet. Would they have heard the echo of the engines in their dreams? They won’t find out any time soon, because it didn’t happen.
And now the Rock is back, too.
Time marches on. Fans grew up watching NASCAR and never saw these places on the schedule, places where heroes raced door-to-door, where dreams were made and others broken until the sun set on them.
There are fans, lots of them now, who never saw Richard Petty or Dale Earnhardt reach the record seven titles that stand today. There are fans today who didn’t see Jimmie Johnson join them. Darrell Waltrip, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough and David Pearson are names they’ve heard but don’t really know anymore.
Those drivers raced at some of the big, modern superspeedways but also at places like Darlington Raceway, Martinsville Speedway, North Wilkesboro, Rockingham and Bowman Gray, and you can feel the weight of them. The ghosts are thick in the air all around.
NASCAR needs the ghosts.
Race fans can be made, but most are born, introduced the shiny cars and speedy heroes practically at birth. They learn racing from their fathers, mothers and grandfathers. They learn the drivers from their favorite uncles, grandmothers and big brothers. Going to the track for a Cup Series race is a rite of passage, an invitation to a world that’s already been painted around them.
There’s a balance to be struck between the old and new in the sport. The more places NASCAR can bring the noise, the smells and the colors to audiences, the more people will have the chance to experience what it really is up close.
But leave those old places behind and pretty soon those fans feel left and overlooked too. The sport has changed a lot, and while some change has been positive, NASCAR has teetered on the edge of losing its past.
It can’t let that happen.
Sunday night’s Clash showcased the kind of racing that built the sport and still has a place in it. It was the perfect venue to create excitement for the upcoming season. Drivers could race aggressively and not have to worry about points, playoffs or anything but passing as many cars as possible and maybe creating a little chaos along the way. It was loud, and it was gritty, and the crowd was there for all of it.
It was also a reminder that somewhere among the superspeedways and modern venues in far-flung places there’s still a place for a little quarter mile in North Carolina, for North Wilkesboro, the Rock and maybe, someday, others.
As NASCAR evolves, it’s necessary to keep its history alive. Today’s fans need to listen to the stories. They need to be able to see the places and understand who the characters were.
Why?
Because there are still stories left to be written, and it’s only in the context of all that’s come before those stories come to life. Yesterday’s stories made today’s fans. The ones we’re writing right now only make them more compelling. NASCAR’s future lies in part in all its yesterdays.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.
Going completely away from all the tracks listed is one of the mistakes made during NASCAR’s rise. Articles & TV segments from back then lamented Wilkesboro a little but by the tail end of the glory days, the media shills couldn’t dump on Rockingham hard enough. I never understood why except that most of the NASCAR media function like state TV in a communist country.