You drove by her every once in a while, maybe on the way to Bristol Motor Speedway, and each time she looked a little more timeworn, more lost to the ages.
Yes, the grandstands were still there, rising among the Blue Ridge foothills in Wilkes County, N.C., but it seemed like that was more because nobody could be bothered to tear them down, letting nature do the work instead. Rolls of hay sat in the infield where cars were once prepared for the best stock-car drivers NASCAR could produce.
Weeds grew through cracks in the pavement and retaining walls. Jeff Gordon’s No. 24 faded on the scoreboard that still marked the results of the last NASCAR Cup Series race in 1996. A brief revival hadn’t lasted, and it seemed like only a matter of time until all that remained of North Wilkesboro Speedway, once a twice-a-year Cup stop, crumbled back into the dirt for good.
Until the day when North Wilkesboro rose from the ashes, reborn, a phoenix reawakening in small town America.
This one was for the fans.
If the 2020 pandemic had a positive, this might have been it. The track had been scanned for iRacing a few months before, thanks in large part to the mostly retired Dale Earnhardt Jr. Earnhardt had watched his father race at North Wilkesboro, but had missed the chance to run a Cup car there himself, one of several long careers that came and went without a lap on the old track. Earnhardt was adamant that the track be scanned to preserve the original layout, which ran slightly uphill on the backstretch and back down on the front.
Then, when NASCAR ground to a halt in spring 2020 and turned to virtual racing to give the fans something, an opportunity arose: North Wilkesboro might be decaying, but the virtual version was alive and well — and now, NASCAR’s biggest stars could get a taste of racing there.
That virtual race may have provided a spark — a generation of fans had never seen a race at the track and many had been clamoring for more short tracks.
Still, it seemed as though the time was past for the old track. Speedway Motorsports had bought the place to close it down, to give a race to the then-new Texas Motor Speedway. And if the owners had no interest in the track, what hope was there?
When Speedway Motorsports patriarch Bruton Smith died, his son Marcus took the reins. And in a guest stint on Earnhardt’s podcast, he said words fans had longed to hear: “We haven’t forgotten about North Wilkesboro.”…
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