NASCAR’s Longer-Than-You-Realize Relationship with Road Racing

• Known since its inception as primarily an oval-track discipline, NASCAR has long had a presence at left-hand, right-hand venues.

• All told, its top series has raced at least once at 16 of them, including three temporary circuits designed around airports.

• In fact, the first of its 155 road races (among 2,729 total events through last weekend) was at the Linden (N.J.) Airport in June of 1954.

While much of its upper-level corporate attention is focused on a single car in this weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, the rest of NASCAR’s 30-some Cup Series teams are at another road race, this one at Sonoma Raceway in northern California.

In France, seven-time Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson, past F1 champion Jenson Button, and Le Mans veteran Mike Rockenfeller will share a Hendrick Motorsports-prepared Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 in the Saturday-Sunday endurance race. It’s part of the Le Mans Garage 56 project, which is reserved for a car accepted for embracing what officials call “technology of tomorrow and beyond.”

The sanctioning body and corporate partners Goodyear, Chevrolet, and IMSA have invested countless millions in that one entry. Only 55 cars will start the twice-around-the-clock race, so by rule, the Garage 56 entry can’t win. The whole thing, for all intents and purposes, is a massive PR and media-driven campaign to draw attention to NASCAR and its sponsors. So far, it seems to be working.

Things will be quite different at Sonoma. There, 38 cars will run 110 laps around the 1.99-mile course (that’s 218 miles) in the year’s 16th points-paying race. It’s the second of this year’s six road races, after Circuit of the Americas in March. After Sonoma, the tour visits downtown Chicago in July, the Indy infield course and Watkins Glen in August, and the Roval at Charlotte in October. It’s been difficult to gauge fan interest, but some of the more discerning one seem more receptive to road racing today than in the recent past.

Known since its inception as primarily an oval-track discipline, NASCAR has long had a presence at left-hand, right-hand venues. All told, its top series has raced at least once at 16 of them, including three temporary circuits designed around airports. In fact, the first of its 155 road races (among 2,729 total events through last weekend) was at the Linden (N.J.) Airport in June of 1954. There, on a 2.00-mile course laid out among runways and taxiways, Al Keller won a 50-lap, 100-mile race in (gasp!) a Jaguar.

Other long-abandoned and mostly-forgotten venues hosted also road races during the early- to late-1950s. Among them were airport circuits in Montgomery, Ala. and Kitsap, Wa. The famous Bridgehampton Circuit on Long Island gave New Yorkers their first close-up look at NASCAR’s top series. Willow Springs (Ca.) Raceway, which hosted Cup races in 1956 and 1957, was a shooting location for the recent Ford v. Ferrari movie.

Finally, after years on less-than-ideal venues, NASCAR took its show to Riverside Raceway. The 2.63-mile track in the southern California desert hosted 48 races between 1958 and its closure in 1988. (FYI: In 1981 Riverside had races in January, June, and November; except for the 2020 COVID-impacted season, no other track has ever hosted three races in a season). Among the winners in its early days were “outsiders” Dan Gurney, Mark Donohue, A.J. Foyt, Ray Elder, and Parnelli Jones.

And, of course, plenty of NASCAR Hall of Fame drivers won there, too: Richard Petty, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Bobby Allison, Benny Parsons, Rusty Wallace, and Terry Labonte. Hall of Famer star Bill Elliott got his first career victory there, as did Ricky Rudd and Tim Richmond.