Motorsport News

NASCAR, moonshine’s historic ties rekindle before All-Star Race

NASCAR, moonshine's historic ties rekindle before All-Star Race

Tuesday, March 26, was supposed to be a routine morning at the resurrected North Wilkesboro Speedway. The legendary 0.625-mile short track is carved into the foothills that rise from the red dirt northwestern corner of North Carolina, where the Piedmont region gives way to the Appalachian Mountains. The NASCAR All-Star Race, which takes the green flag Sunday night, was still eight weeks away, what should have been a comfortable span for the speedway ground crews that were starting the process of waking the 77-year-old bullring from its wintertime slumber. The drone of leaf blowers echoed off the crusty concrete frontstretch grandstand.

Then the machines fell silent.

Steve Swift was there, up from his office at Charlotte Motor Speedway, headquarters of Speedway Motorsports Inc., owner of a portfolio of NASCAR facilities including North Wilkesboro.

“One of the crew came to us and said, ‘Hey man, we might have a problem here,'” remembers Swift, SMI’s vice president of operations and development, aka The Guy Who Makes Sure the Racetracks Work Properly.

“We all ran up there and there was a foot-and-a-half crack in the grandstand, where we had taken some of the old seats out to do some maintenance work. Next thing you know, we take a look through that hole and it’s a not a hole. It’s a cavity. I mean, you could put a Ford pickup truck in there. I thought, this is a cave. Well, that isn’t good.”

Not good for track operators, sure. But for everyone else, be they NASCAR fans, historians, people who love liquor, or Swift’s coworkers who are in the business of promoting races, that hole in the grandstand was awesome. Like, Indiana Jones awesome.

Was it a moonshine cave?

For those who do not know, a quick primer on the intertwined, inebriated history of NASCAR and Wilkes County, North Carolina. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Carolinas were settled largely by Scots-Irish immigrants, who brought their ways of distilling homemade whiskey across the pond with…

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