The Return of North Wilkesboro Speedway, NASCAR's Most Famous Ghost Track

Back in February 2020, officials from Wilkes County in North Carolina announced that they were trying to reach Speedway Motorsports ownership in order to discuss reviving North Wilkesboro Speedway. It looked like there was very little chance of it happening. I recall tweeting as much at the time. This was NASCAR's most famous ghost track, after all, deteriorating since the big show left in the late 1990s. How glad I was to be wrong, as I watched the start of a CARS Tour race kick off from the top of the stands in turn one on a warm August evening in 2022.

Working in racing has left me a bit jaded to some track experiences; few races stand out as specifically memorable. Walking into North Wilkesboro Speedway just as the sun was setting, though, seeing tens of thousands of people filling the long-empty stands is a moment that's going to rank high on my list, all the way up there with pitting my first race at Daytona and walking into Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the first time.

Living roughly 50 miles east of North Wilkesboro Speedway made the decision to attend the races scheduled during this Racetrack Revival Wednesday an easy one. Since the green flag was scheduled for 7:30pm, I figured that leaving at 5:45 for my 50-minute drive would be plenty of time. I realized that I didn’t account for the Dale Jr. factor as I stood in traffic two miles south of the track more than an hour later. It’s fitting that the participation of Dale Earnhardt Jr. in this CARS Tour race brought out such a large crowd, as one of his tweets was a large catalyst for the speedway coming back into existence.

The effort to revitalize North Wilkesboro Speedway all started on an airplane that Earnhardt Jr. was sharing with CEO Marcus Smith of Speedway Motorsports, Inc. (SMI) back in the fall of 2019. Dale Jr. ended up on Smith’s plane because his own plane was damaged in a crash a month earlier so they got to chatting and Dale Jr. suggested that North Wilkesboro should be scanned so that it could be added to iRacing and at least preserved virtually before it fully decayed. Smith agreed so Dale Jr. reached out to Steve Myers at iRacing to see if they could happen and since Myers was hesitant at first, Dale Jr. decided to send out a tweet to persuade him.

Hundreds of responses rolled in which eventually culminated in the cleanup of the track in December of 2019. Volunteers and workers from Bristol Motor Speedway joined Dale Jr. and his team, bringing out landscaping and track-sweeping equipment so they could get it clean enough to be scanned. The scan was successfully completed just as virtual racing was ramping up due to the cancellation of in-person sporting events amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual North Wilkesboro track ended up being used as the finale of the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series, broadcast live on Fox and FS1 in May of 2020.

Virtual racing brought North Wilkesboro Speedway to a larger audience and it gave fuel to the locals in Wilkes County who had been pushing for its return. But attention wasn’t enough on its own to push SMI to make a decision. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 did help push things along. The $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill was signed into law on March 11, 2021 by President Joe Biden with the goal of speeding up the country’s recovery from the effects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two months after the American Rescue Plan Act got its approval, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced that a portion of those funds would be allocated towards SMI tracks to include Charlotte Motor Speedway, Rockingham, and North Wilkesboro. The North Carolina state budget was signed in November 2021 and North Wilkesboro was allocated $18 million out of the $40 million that was allocated to those Speedway Motorsports tracks. This started new conversations, and soon the racing world welcomed the announcement during the Bristol Dirt weekend in April of 2022 that racing would return to North Wilkesboro.

Fast forward to August of 2022 when I decide to approach the track from the southern side of Highway 421. Friends already inside have warned me of delays getting in because of how many people decided to show up. I decide to exit from the highway a little earlier and drive up some of the fun curvy roads of Wilkes County and approach using Fishing Creek Road, only to find a few others with the same idea.

As I’m sitting in traffic I see people getting out of their cars to negotiate with the locals to park in their driveways. Others hunt for some space far enough from the road to park their cars and leave them there just so they can make the walk to the track. I decide to continue creeping up the road and after about thirty minutes of sitting in traffic I reach a farm field that has been converted into an impromptu parking lot. I pass hundreds of cars and freshly baled hay as I pull into the field and find a spot.