Motorsport News

SRX Preview: South Boston Speedway

2021 SRX Michael Waltrip car (Credit: SRX)

South Boston Speedway is right above the Virginia-North Carolina line, about 70 miles to the east of Martinsville Speedway. Virginia has long been a home of exceptional short tracks, with NASCAR Cup Series venues Martinsville and Richmond Raceway being joined by other such tracks as Langley Speedway, Motor Mile Speedway, the closed Southside Speedway, and my own personal home tracks of Old Dominion Speedway and its successor Dominion Raceway.

South Boston has a long pedigree of great drivers, beginning with greats at the time of its opening such as Ray Hendrick, Tiny Lund and Sonny Hutchins. Later, in addition to legendary late model drivers such as Jack Ingram and Geoffrey Bodine winning track championships, many great drivers began their career at “SoBo”. The 1990’s saw Jeff and Ward Burton join 1995 track champion Elliott Sadler as South Boston alumni to make it to the Cup level, along with Stacy Compton. Denny Hamlin also cut his teeth racing and winning in late models at South Boston.

The track is owned by the Mattioli family, making it the sister track to Pocono Raceway. One key reason why Pocono has stayed on the Cup schedule for so many years in spite of inconsistent racing is just how much of a premium the Mattioli family puts on the fan experience and facilities, and South Boston, albeit at a lower budget, is no different in that regard.

The track dimensions for this four-tenths of a mile oval is 12 degrees of banking in the turns and 10 degrees on the straight.

I love food, and of all of the SRX tracks on this year’s schedule, perhaps the greatest delicacy offered at these venues is the legendary “SoBo Bologna Burger“. It may not reach the Martinsville hot dog as far as mythical qualities, but there are definitely some stories if you ask the regulars at the track. Sadler once ate 16 — yes, 16 — of them in one night.

Here is the entry list for Saturday night, with the guest drivers in bold:

The random qualifying draw was announced on Thursday, June 23rd. Labonte will be starting heat one on pole.

Here’s a look at three notable Superstars competing this upcoming Saturday night:

Maybe no driver has ever been happier in victory than Helio Castroneves, who stunned the world last week when he hopped into a surprise 13th entry at Five Flags Speedway and won the first SRX main event of 2022. Then, the Brazilian made further headlines by announcing that he and SRX CEO Don Hawk had a bet that if he had won an SRX race this…

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