North Wilkesboro Rising

I never saw a race at North Wilkesboro Speedway. By the time I discovered NASCAR and automobile racing in 1997, it was a few months too late. The checkers had flown for the last time, perhaps appropriately, over young phenom Jeff Gordon as NASCAR ushered in a new era.

As the sport boomed, tracks like the one affectionately known simply as North Wilkes simply couldn’t accommodate the crowds the sport was attracting. Some tracks were selling out 100,000 seats with a waiting list for tickets. That many fans put a lot of strain on a facility, from parking to restrooms and concessions, to the local roads surrounding the track.

And so NASCAR, even as times were as good as they would ever be, left places like Wilkes County, N.C., behind.

Looking back on that last day at the half-mile oval that ran both up and downhill on the straights, the fans leaving the stands for the last time didn’t look like they had spent hours rooting on their favorite drivers and cheering for the finish. They didn’t look like folks who were out for a fine day at the racetrack. They looked like they were leaving the funeral of a cherished friend.

The gates closed behind them and the track stood empty, with only the changing seasons to record its passing days. Once-vibrant paint peeled, grass grew through cracks in the racing surface. Save for the hum of traffic on nearby Route 421, it was quiet, the roar of the engines and the crowd just memories. Maybe you could hear them on the air if the wind was just right, imagining the cars at full song on an early autumn afternoon.

Time marched on, and racers raced, now on mile-and-a-half-long monsters of tracks in places like Texas and Kansas City and in the shadow of Las Vegas’ glitter. The old-timers told stories of how things used to be as NASCAR’s history faded into the tapestry the sport was still weaving. New fans clamored for just about anything they could put their hands on with their favorite driver’s likeness or name. They sat in the stands at Auto Club Speedway and New Hampshire Motor Speedway and didn’t think about North Wilkesboro or Riverside Raceway or any of the other tracks lost to time and progress. If they listened to the old-timers’ stories, they might briefly wonder what it all had been like.

As I watched more and learned more, I began to understand and embrace those stories. NASCAR is a sport that only gets better when you understand who and what came before. The races that I attended every year at New…