NASCAR’s North Wilkesboro return excited drivers, fans alike
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
NORTH WILKESBORO, N.C. — The 2023 NASCAR All-Star Race at the back-from-the-dead North Wilkesboro Speedway wasn’t great. Kyle Larson led 145 of 200 laps and defeated runner-up Bubba Wallace by 4.5 seconds.
The traffic getting out of the little .625-mile moonshiners’ bullring, located on farmland with only one road in and out — Speedway Road — wasn’t nearly as bad as feared, but it wasn’t exactly zooming, either. As Larson wrapped up his lengthy Victory Lane celebration on the roof of an infield building, carried there by hydraulic lift just as it last did his Hendrick Motorsports boss, Jeff Gordon, nearly 27 years ago, endless lines of red taillights still illuminated the Brushy Mountains under the sliver of a razor-thin crescent moon.
Yet, no one was mad. Not even close. From the crawling cavalcade of cars and the sold-out hillside campgrounds to the front porches of Wilkes County locals watching those roads and hills, so long abandoned, now covered in a parade of pickups and sedans, so many adorned with slanted No. 3 stickers, everyone was too busy smiling, laughing and, sure, some weeping, but with joy.
Even in the North Wilkesboro Speedway garage area, where 23 teams packed up their machines and equipment after having been pile-driven by Larson for the better part of two hours, the collective expression on their faces was that of a bunch of kids at Chuck E. Cheese.
Final from Wilkesboro. #AllStarRace pic.twitter.com/cRxmGRMH6H
— North Wilkesboro Speedway (@NWBSpeedway) May 22, 2023
“I don’t think you’ll ever see a bunch of guys so excited after getting their butts kicked,” Chase Elliott said jokingly after finishing a respectable fifth but yet a whopping half-lap behind his Hendrick Motorsports teammate. “I think to all of us, this whole weekend felt like real racing. No frills. Just short-track racing, tires getting eaten up, no fancy garage, just guys working shoulder to shoulder. All the stuff that people thought maybe they were tired of back then, they ended up kind of missing it.”
That’s what nearly 27 years of absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder will do to people.
For the racers and their teams, imperfect race or not, there was a relief in the return to that feeling. For the people of Wilkes County and the surrounding areas, that sense of relief was much deeper. It was a returning of their identity.
All weekend long, those people could be found returning themselves, back to the routines and locations they had been forced to give up when NASCAR gave up on their racetrack. Habits and practices honed over five decades and nearly 100 Cup Series races hosted. They dusted off old ball caps, laundered T-shirts to get 30 years of mothball smell out of them and pulled the covers off old Winnebagos that had been parked behind their houses since ’96. They returned to riverside campgrounds and old-school diners, curious to see if maybe the same old couple ran the place, and perhaps the same old items were still on the menu.
“As soon as I got here, I just drove around to see if I could get my bearings straight,” said NASCAR Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip, a 10-time North Wilkesboro Speedway winner, who earned the bulk of those wins driving for Junior Johnson, the moonshine-running, NASCAR-driving, championship team-owning demigod of Wilkes County, who died in December 2019. “I looked for where [my wife] Stevie and I would go eat. I looked for the farm we almost bought up here. I looked for Junior’s house. I couldn’t find any of it. It’s been so long, and stuff around here hasn’t changed much, but also it has. Maybe just my old-man memory has.”
Then DW, who finished 27th in that final race run in ’96, leaned out over the railing of the speedway’s rooftop. The NASCAR All-Star Race co-grand marshal (with 15-time North Wilkesboro winner Richard Petty) took a big drag off the morning air, sucking up a sample of the sunrise cloud of smoke that wafted in from the campgrounds.
“But you smell that? That’s bacon frying. Real bacon. And sausage,” Waltrip said. “When I drove for Junior, I had a room at his house and on race mornings he’d wake me up at like 5 a.m., in the kitchen cooking breakfast. Then we’d come over here and win the race.”
A few miles away, over on River Street in downtown Wilkesboro, dozens of people were marinating in that same scent, sitting down at rows of picnic tables as part of the overflow crowd at Glenn’s Restaurant, although locals still call it Glenn’s Tastee Freeze. It’s been here since 1963, opened sometime between the races won that year over at the racetrack by Petty and Marvin Panch. On race mornings, they were open for breakfast only. The rest of the week, they were open from dawn until the last customer was served, most wrestling with which of the 50 milkshakes to order, from simple vanilla and strawberry to The Intimidator, a Dale Earnhardt-inspired mixture of red velvet, brownies and chocolate ice cream.
“We started coming here in 1981, the same year they laid down that asphalt that they are racing on this weekend,” explained Charles Lane of Knoxville, Tennessee, sitting alongside his son and two grandchildren, both of them way too busy throwing down on biscuits and gravy to listen to their pawpaw. “I promised my wife I would take the same photo of them that we took of my son here and his brother when we brought them here in the ’80s. He was their age then. We brought the old photo with us to make sure we get it right.”
There was a lot of that at North Wilkesboro Speedway over the weekend. People posing in just the right spot, wearing just the right clothes, taking photos and then checking to make sure it looked just right. In ’95, Kayla Knight was an elementary school student, and her mother, Christy, snapped a pic of her little girl up against the backstretch catchfence in jean shorts and yellow socks, with a hand on that fence as she watched Gordon & Co. roll by during driver introductions. On Sunday, they found the same spot and the now-30-something woman posed for the same photo.
“I even went and bought some yellow socks,” the King, North Carolina, native said proudly, mom and daughter having just polished off a plate of chopped pork at Little Richard’s Barbecue just a few exits down the Benny Parsons Highway from the racetrack.
Along that same refurbished fence, the one that was entwined in jungle-thick kudzu not so long ago, fans mingled in what looked like a NASCAR costume party. There was a man in the 1993 Maxx Trading Cards Rookie of the Year T-shirt. There was a woman in an Earnhardt “5-Time Winston Cup Series Champion” T-shirt — signed by the man himself — that she said was taken out of a picture frame in her living room just to wear this weekend. Fans posed with JB Rader, a local moonshine concocter made famous in recent years on cable television. They sipped ‘shine in the stands, some legally bought and mixed with various juices and flavors at racetrack concession stands, and at least that much also carried from the mountains outside in via cooler.
“The store-bought stuff is good — I mean, it’s made from Willie Clay Call’s recipe,” explained Thomas Pratt, who was born in Wilkes County and now resides in nearby Boone. He held up a Yeti cup decorated with a Dale Earnhardt Jr. Sun-Drop soda sticker and motioned to take a whiff. “But this here is original recipe. You can tell because if you smell it too hard your nose hairs will catch fire.”
From the Moravian Falls Family Campground to the Airstreams parked at Rick’s Lazy Acres along Monroe Road across from the track to the people who tired of not moving in postrace traffic and decided to pull over, pop the tailgate and crack open another cold one by the LED light of the old, resurrected racetrack atop the hill above, no one cared that Larson had gone full Hulk vs. Loki, Tyson vs. Spinks, or, for that matter, Petty vs. the field. No one was asking what the future of the track might be (“I’m definitely thinking that way,” said owner Marcus Smith of a future Cup race). No one cared that it might be a while before they got home, like early morning, or that their boss was going to give them a dressing-down when they showed up late for work a few hours later.
No one cared. At all. About any of that. Hell, about anything. Because North Wilkesboro Speedway was back. And if it can come back after all those years and all that rust and all those weeds and all that hope lost, anything is possible.
“You just give up on stuff, right?” said a man who would only refer to himself as Cornbread, despite multiple requests to expound upon that identification. “We had companies give up on us. NASCAR gave up on us. So, I gave up on the racetrack, too. And damn, man, here we are …
“You want a beer?”
It’s 2025 MLB All-Star Home Run Derby day in Atlanta!
Some of the most dynamic home run hitters in baseball will be taking aim at the Truist Park stands on Monday (8 p.m. ET on ESPN) in one of the most anticipated events of the summer.
While the prospect of a back-to-back champion is out of the picture — 2024 winner Teoscar Hernandez is not a part of this year’s field — a number of exciting stars will be taking the field, including Atlanta’s own Matt Olson, who replaced Ronald Acuna Jr. just three days before the event. Will Olson make a run in front of his home crowd? Will Cal Raleigh show off the power that led to 38 home runs in the first half? Or will one of the younger participants take the title?
We have your one-stop shop for everything Derby related, from predictions to live updates once we get underway to analysis and takeaways at the night’s end.
MLB Home Run Derby field
Cal Raleigh, Seattle Mariners (38 home runs in 2025)
James Wood, Washington Nationals (24)
Junior Caminero, Tampa Bay Rays (23)
Byron Buxton, Minnesota Twins (21)
Brent Rooker, Athletics (20)
Matt Olson, Atlanta Braves (17)
Jazz Chisholm Jr., New York Yankees (17)
Oneil Cruz, Pittsburgh Pirates (16)
Live updates
Who is going to win the Derby and who will be the runner-up?
Jeff Passan: Raleigh. His swing is perfect for the Derby: He leads MLB this season in both pull percentage and fly ball percentage, so it’s not as if he needs to recalibrate it to succeed. He has also become a prolific hitter from the right side this season — 16 home runs in 102 at-bats — and his ability to switch between right- and left-handed pitching offers a potential advantage. No switch-hitter (or catcher for that matter) has won a Home Run Derby. The Big Dumper is primed to be the first, beating Buxton in the finals.
Alden Gonzalez: Cruz. He might be wildly inconsistent at this point in his career, but he is perfect for the Derby — young enough to possess the stamina required for a taxing event that could become exhausting in the Atlanta heat; left-handed, in a ballpark where the ball carries out better to right field; and, most importantly, capable of hitting balls at incomprehensible velocities. Raleigh will put on a good show from both sides of the plate but will come in second.
Buster Olney: Olson. He is effectively pinch-hitting for Acuna, and because he received word in the past 72 hours of his participation, he hasn’t had the practice rounds that the other competitors have been going through. But he’s the only person in this group who has done the Derby before, which means he has experienced the accelerated pace, adrenaline and push of the crowd.
His pitcher, Eddie Perez, knows something about performing in a full stadium in Atlanta. And, as Olson acknowledged in a conversation Sunday, the park generally favors left-handed hitters because of the larger distances that right-handed hitters must cover in left field.
Jesse Rogers: Olson. Home-field advantage will mean something this year as hitting in 90-plus degree heat and humidity will be an extra challenge in Atlanta. Olson understands that and can pace himself accordingly. Plus, he was a late addition. He has got nothing to lose. He’ll outlast the young bucks in the field. And I’m not putting Raleigh any lower than second — his first half screams that he’ll be in the finals against Olson.
Jorge Castillo: Wood. His mammoth power isn’t disputed — he can jack baseballs to all fields. But the slight defect in his power package is that he doesn’t hit the ball in the air nearly as often as a typical slugger. Wood ranks 126th out of 155 qualified hitters across the majors in fly ball percentage. And he still has swatted 24 home runs this season. So, in an event where he’s going to do everything he can to lift baseballs, hitting fly balls won’t be an issue, and Wood is going to show off that gigantic power en route to a victory over Cruz in the finals.
Who will hit the longest home run of the night — and how far?
Passan: Cruz hits the ball harder than anyone in baseball history. He’s the choice here, at 493 feet.
Gonzalez: If you exclude the Coors Field version, there have been just six Statcast-era Derby home runs that have traveled 497-plus feet. They were compiled by two men: Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton. James Wood — all 6-foot-7, 234 pounds of him — will become the third.
Olney: James Wood has the easy Stanton- and Judge-type power, and he will clear the Chophouse with the longest homer. Let’s say 497 feet.
Rogers: Hopefully he doesn’t injure himself doing it, but Buxton will break out his massive strength and crush a ball at least 505 feet. I don’t see him advancing far in the event, but for one swing, he’ll own the night.
Castillo: Cruz hits baseballs hard and far. He’ll crush a few bombs, and one will reach an even 500 feet.
Who is the one slugger fans will know much better after the Derby?
Passan: Buxton capped his first half with a cycle on Saturday, and he’ll carry that into the Derby, where he will remind the world why he was baseball’s No. 1 prospect in 2015. Buxton’s talent has never been in question, just his health. And with his body feeling right, he has the opportunity to put on a show fans won’t soon forget.
Olney: Caminero isn’t a big name and wasn’t a high-end prospect like Wood was earlier in his career. Just 3½ years ago, Caminero was dealt to the Rays by the Cleveland Guardians in a relatively minor November trade for pitcher Tobias Myers. But since then, he has refined his ability to cover inside pitches and is blossoming this year into a player with ridiculous power. He won’t win the Derby, but he’ll open some eyes.
What’s the one moment we’ll all be talking about long after this Derby ends?
Gonzalez: The incredible distances and velocities that will be reached, particularly by Wood, Cruz, Caminero, Raleigh and Buxton. The hot, humid weather at Truist Park will only aid the mind-blowing power that will be on display Monday night.
Rogers: The exhaustion on the hitter’s faces, swinging for home run after home run in the heat and humidity of Hot-lanta!
Castillo: Cruz’s 500-foot blast and a bunch of other lasers he hits in the first two rounds before running out of gas in the finals.
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