NASCAR Goes from 'Backwoods to Wall Street' for Awards Banquet in 1981

• Bill France Jr. was the architect and engineer to get NASCAR the attention it so coveted when it moved its Awards Banquet to New York City.

• And for nearly another 30 years, New York became NASCAR’s home away from home.

• Darrell Waltrip became the first NASCAR driver to be honored in NYC and at the Waldorf Astoria in 1981.

For more than 30 years since it was founded, NASCAR was known primarily as a Southeastern sport. But if the sport was going to grow and became more accepted around the country, it would have to take itself to bigger and better plateaus.

And there was no better plateau in the country than the Big Apple, New York City. If NASCAR was to be accepted along with some of the biggest names in sports—like baseball’s New York Yankees, the NBA’s New York Knicks, the NHL’s New York Rangers and the NFL’s Jets and Giants—New York was the place to be.

Bill France Jr. was the architect and engineer to get NASCAR the attention it so coveted, choosing to make a huge statement by moving the sport’s highlight of each season—it’s annual Awards Banquet—to New York, and most notably to the most prestigious hotel in the world at the time, the legendary Waldorf-Astoria.

The overwhelming desire for France and NASCAR? If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere, so it was up to you, New York, New York, to show the good old boys and girls from the South a party like they’d never seen before.

“You’d go to Daytona (where the Awards Banquet had been held in the Plaza Hotel for roughly 30 years) and they had the ceremony down in the basement of the Plaza,” NASCAR Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip once told NASCAR.com. “No media, no people, anything like that. Just all the guys that finished in the top 10 in points.”

But then came 1981 and Waltrip became the first NASCAR driver to be honored in NYC and at the Waldorf.

And for nearly another 30 years, New York became NASCAR’s home away from home. The Apple became so important to the sport that the league opened a business and PR office in town to generate national media attention as well as build relationships and attract sponsorships, advertisers and more.