By The Commish

It’s been a hectic few weeks of professional meetings, and the one in early March took me up to the Blue Ridge mountain area of North Carolina to present a paper. I should have hurried back on Saturday afternoon to catch up with all the things I've let dangle for the last month, but then I saw the sign: "Highway 421—North Wilkesboro—Next right." I couldn’t resist the chance to revisit the past, so I took the exit and headed for my racing past.

Many of you won't remember North Wilkesboro Speedway. It's been gone from the Cup ranks for almost a decade now, when it was sold to Bruton Smith and Bob Bahre by descendents of the original owners and its dates split between Texas and New Hampshire. Enoch Staley's baby was one of the great short-track bullrings, only five-eighths of a mile, with one of the most unique straightaway designs in racing, uphill on the backstretch and downhill on the frontstretch, making it almost a short-track road course. There were almost no bad seats here. The angle of the grandstands and the 14-degree banking made action visible on all parts of the track. Since 1949, when Staley gambled on "strictly stock" racing and put asphalt down, it was one of the great American tracks, one that challenged drivers to master its tight turns and aggressive shifting. I saw only two races here-- Cale Yarborough winning in an Oldsmobile in 1978 and Tim Richmond in the Blue Max Pontiac in 1984-- but they remain sharp in my memory.

Jeff Gordon only raced here eight times in the Cup series, and like many of the tracks on the circuit, he struggled at first. But 1995, the year he figured out short tracks like Martinsville and Bristol, was also his breakthrough year at North Wilkesboro. In his last four races here, he averaged a second-place finish, and won the last Cup race ever held there on September 29, 1996.

But all things change. The track that once gave Junior Johnson some of his greatest triumphs and where Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt dominated lies dormant now. The parking lot is still there, sprouting weeds through the cracks in the asphalt, but the outlying areas-- where the souvenir haulers and campers once reigned-- are starting to fill in with You-Store-It warehouses and convenience stores. Most of the local businesses that fed off of Cup weekends are gone, too. The track itself is shabby and run-down, the paint peeling, a few faded Winston Cup signs still showing. The stands, which seated only 40,000 in the track's heyday, look shaky and worn. As I drove around, trying to find a way in, I saw a few remnants of the Roush "Gong Show," which used the old track two years ago. But mostly, what I saw was faded glory. It was sad, indeed.

There was a grassroots movement going on to "Save the Speedway." The heads of the movement were young racing fans who wanted to revive North Wilkesboro as a local driving mecca. The price is steep; Smith and Bahre are said to be asking $12 million for the property. An investment banker working with the group has pulled out, citing a lack of firm commitments from racing series to use the track. And the proposed drawings for the new track show it as a modest local track, without the corporate, media, or garage amenities it would take to bring high-level racing back to "the little piece of heaven" in Wilkes County. No matter what we wish for, it's clear that Cup racing will never again return to North Wilkesboro.

That doesn't mean, though, that we shouldn't remember and learn from it. After the parody of racing we saw at California Speedway in February 2006-— and which we will see repeated often in Chicago, Kansas City, and other cookie-cutter tracks—- it's clear that NASCAR must learn the hard lesson that templates might belong on race cars, but never on tracks. North Wilkesboro's compact, efficient design ought to be used as a model by the people trying to design a space-effective track either in Staten Island or the Pacific Northwest. The television angles would be terrific, the fan seating could be fabulous (think Bristol), and (if they get the banking right) the racing ought to be first-class, a combination of everything we love about short tracks with the driving challenges of a road course. You don't have to put North Wilkesboro in Wilkes County to get good racing out of it. You could put North Wilkesboro or some of its flavor in any new track that is built, but only by an act of will.

As I headed out to I-77 and back home, I mused that, given ISC’s predilections for 1.5 mile tracks that can be used, very ineffectively, for open-wheeled racing, this infusion of old into new probably won't happen. And since NASCAR will have editorial control over exhibits in the new Hall of Fame, we probably won't see an exhibit on "The Glory That Was North Wilkesboro" there any time soon. It's a pity. If there ever were a track that deserved to be in a Hall of Fame-- if there ever were a track whose glory days should be celebrated and sung-- North Wilkesboro is that track. But some moments in time pass by. Sadly, I fear that the Little Piece of Heaven's time will never come again. A song goes through my mind every time I think about that track, and I bet you can guess which one.

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