The occasion of NASCAR’s 75th anniversary is, in a phrase, Bizarro World.
In many ways, events transpiring in 2023 make it seem as if history is folding in on itself, happening in reverse, while also simultaneously moving forward.
It’s 2023, but at any given moment, you could swear it’s 1996.
Why the sense of temporal displacement?
Last Wednesday (Feb. 22), a press release went out to NASCAR media members with an update on tracks renovations and ticket availability …. for North Wilkesboro Speedway.
In 82 days (May 21), the NASCAR Cup Series’ will make make its improbable return to the track. It comes 27 years after NWBS was bought and stripped of its race dates by Speedway Motorsports and Bob Bahre (then owner of New Hampshire Motor Speedway) and left for dead.
SAFER barriers have been put in. Musco lighting was in the process of being installed.
Buildings are being restored.
All in the name of the most anticipated NASCAR All-Star Race since at least 1992.
North Wilkesboro, one of the original NASCAR tracks in 1949, was the most high profile causality of the sport’s rise to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s.
NASCAR and Speedway Motorsports went where the money and better facilities were. In 1996, two years before NASCAR’s 50th anniversary, there wasn’t enough of either in Wilkes County, North Carolina to warrant staying.
In the six years after North Wilkesboro’s supposed demise, the Cup Series would hold inaugural events at six facilities:
1997: Texas Motor Speedway and California Speedway (now Auto Club Speedway).
1998: Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
1999: Homestead-Miami Speedway.
2001: Kansas Speedway and Chicagoland Speedway.
Flash forward to 2011, and the Cup Series finally went to Kentucky Speedway, 11 years after the Craftsman Truck Series first raced at the facility.
And that’s just the tracks built during the boom era that were fortunate enough to wrangle a Cup race date at the time.
Which brings us to Sunday, as the sensation of time moving backwards only intensified.
Kyle Busch won the 33rd and final Cup race on Auto Club Speedway’s two-mile circuit.
“It’s a sad day for me to see this racetrack be in its last race being a two-mile configuration,” Busch said after earning his first victory with Richard Childress Racing. “Glad I was able to win the final run here.”
Twenty-six years after Roger Penske threw open the doors of what was then…
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