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Ryan McGee
ROCKINGHAM, N.C. — This time around, it feels different. Everyone around Rockingham, North Carolina, says so.
Man, I hope so.
They said it in 2018, when a man nearly no one in Richmond County had heard of bought the dilapidated Rockingham Speedway and promised a resurrection. They said it three years later, when North Carolina government officials set aside $50 million to do much-needed work on the Tar Heel State’s big three racetracks. They said it when $9 million of that cash was used to repave Rockingham. They repeated it one year ago, when NASCAR announced that two of its national series would spend Easter weekend 2025 at The Rock. And this week, the people of Rockingham have gleefully reiterated their hopes that, yes, this time is indeed much, much different, as they have watched the team haulers of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck and Xfinity series roll through their town of 9,000, turn up U.S. Highway 1, and churn northbound through the Carolina Sandhills for a Friday/Saturday doubleheader.
A pair of races held on a 1.017-mile oval that refuses to die, once again emerging from that sand like a mummy wrapped in 200 mph duct tape.
“I was born here, have spent my entire life here, and when the racetrack is empty, something is missing from all of us,” says Bryan Land, a sixth-generation Richmond County native. As a kid, he worked in the kitchen of the Rockingham Speedway infield diner located at the entrance of the garage, feeding scrambled eggs and cheeseburgers to the likes of Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty. As an adult, he serves as county manager for Richmond County, and has found himself back in that same infield. He has been there every night this week, as he was at 8 o’clock on Tuesday night, offering up whatever needs to be done to ensure the racetrack is at its best this weekend. “The excitement we all feel right now is very real. Because that hole we’ve all had, it’s being filled. And yes, it does feel different this time around.”
Like Land, I too was born in Rockingham, in a hospital straight back down that highway in the middle of town, 12 minutes south of the track. Now, it’s just a clinic. But back in the day, I came screaming into the world about two weeks before Cale Yarborough won the American 500. My dad, who’d been a father for all of 13 days, was in the pits at The Rock as a gas can man for Dave Marcis in his No. 30 Lunda Construction Dodge.
I’ve spent decades looking for a pic of my Dad as gas can man for Dave Marcis in the Carolinas, late ’60s/early ’70s. Did a NASCAR Classics YouTube deep dive today and got a screengrab from ’72 Carolina 500 at Rockingham, ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Pretty sure he’s in there. pic.twitter.com/Q59Srp7utL
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) February 25, 2025
I’ll be buried in Rockingham, too. I know exactly where the plot is, in the family cemetery, located about 15 miles west of the track.
My point is that this race weekend and what it might mean is personal.
It’s been personal before, during Rockingham’s other flirtations with renewed racing life. It felt good then, too, but it didn’t feel as it does now. Different. Solid. Supported. Like it’s destined to work this time.
For those who do not know — and based on this timeline, there are likely many — a history lesson.
The Rockingham Speedway was opened in 1965, then known as the North Carolina Motor Speedway. It was built through the efforts of Bill Land, Bryan Land’s grandfather, and Harold Brasington, the same man who 15 years earlier had famously gone full “Field of Dreams” and bulldozed the Darlington Raceway into a patch of South Carolina peanut fields just a short drive south from Rockingham. His efforts in Richmond County resulted in a smaller but similarly quirky oval, one that raced like a short track/superspeedway hybrid.
Over the next four decades, the track that became known as “The Rock” hosted 78 NASCAR Cup Series races. Most of those seasons featured two events per year, one very early, often following the Daytona 500, and the other so late on the calendar that it became the place where championships were clinched by everyone from Earnhardt and Yarborough to Benny Parsons, based in nearby Ellerbe, and Jeff Gordon, who’d turned his very first stock car laps at Rockingham under the tutelage of NASCAR Hall of Famer Buck Baker.
In 2001, Rockingham hosted the first race following the death of Earnhardt, the tiny Eastern North Carolina town descended upon by media members from around the globe, all there to see Steve Park, in a car owned by Earnhardt, earn one of the most emotional NASCAR wins ever witnessed.
But as NASCAR became chic, it began ripping its roots from the ground to go hunting for more money elsewhere. During the racetrack-building boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rockingham ownership changed frequently and it became a bargaining chip in an antitrust lawsuit between shareholders of Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Incorporated (SMI) and NASCAR. In 2003, The Rock’s spring date was moved out west to the California Speedway. One year later, Smith moved the fall race to his still-new show palace, the Texas Motor Speedway.
With the exception of lawn mowers and an occasional movie shoot (“Au revoir, Ricky Bobby …”), Rockingham was silent. The sight of the place jailed in chains and padlocks with no chance for parole was so painful that local residents took to using alternate routes up to Southern Pines just to avoid having to look at it.
I know because I was one of them.
Hope retuned in 2008, when grassroots racer Andy Hillenburg, with backing from local officials, purchased the racetrack when Smith unloaded it at auction, saving it from a slew of salvage and scrap metal companies. For five years, Hillenburg ground it out. He opened up the track as a test facility, even building a Martinsville clone behind the big oval’s backstretch. He brought in ARCA and an alphabet soup of late model series, races won by the fresh-faced likes of Joey Logano and Chase Elliott. Ever heard of them?
In 2012, the Trucks came to town. Kasey Kahne won the first event amid an electric, feel-good atmosphere and large crowd, exacting some Rock revenge after losing the track’s final Cup race in ’04 to Matt Kenseth by a scant .010 seconds, Kahne’s second-ever Cup start.
The following year, Kyle Larson won a second Trucks race. But this time, it felt different in a bad sort of way. Something felt, well, off. The crowd wasn’t nearly as big as ’12. The trash cans were overflowing. Many of the toilets didn’t work. My lasting image of that day is of Hillenburg, only hours before the green flag, in a golf cart, frantically rolling through the parking lots and selling tickets out of his pocket.
Hillenburg is a racer’s racer. He is my friend. I will always be thankful for what he did in Rockingham. But naive business decisions, a short track manager’s mentality, and being crippled by turncoats he’d trusted as friends and business partners left him doomed. By 2013, the place was shuttered again. And, honestly, so were the feelings of hope for the future of The Rock, especially as the years clicked by and that harsh geology of Richmond County literally sandblasted every strip of metal, rubber and wood that it could find.
“It just got so quiet, man,” Land said on Wednesday night. “Anything you’d hear, anything, rumors or truth, you’d hope it was for real.”
Land’s emotion echoes that of everyone I have talked to back home in the past several months, especially during January’s two-day session to shake the place down with the machines that will race there this weekend.
Whenever I have written about the Rockingham Speedway in the past few decades, my fellow natives and family members have taken issue when I dive into the reasons for the rawness of our emotions when it comes to the racetrack. But it also is what it is. When the place was built in the 1960s, Richmond County was booming. Textile mills cranked out cloth night and day from every corner of Rockingham. The town of Hamlet, birthplace of John Coltrane and a pack of NFL players, was an East Coast railroad hub. By the 1980s, all of that was gone, having moved overseas or up the coast.
But the Speedway remained. No matter where in the world a Rockingham resident traveled, when someone asked where we were from and you told them, their immediate response was, “that’s the place with the NASCAR track!”
The Rock wasn’t just a part of our identity. It was our identity. So, when that was stripped away, it felt every bit as devastating as the loss of the mills and the railroad. Only, those left in trickles. This happened via a news release, a sheet of fax paper that might as well have been a wrecking ball.
When Dan Lovenheim bought the place in 2018, he openly questioned what he’d done. Every single time he opened a door or unlocked a building or room, all he found was rust and rot.
“It was probably way worse than anyone realizes, even if they had been there and seen it and thought they knew,” he explained when the track’s race dates were announced by NASCAR one year ago.
Lovenheim made his money by transforming a dead zone of nearby Raleigh into a series of nightclub hot spots. That was a lot of work. He thought.
“Oh, that was nothing compared to what we were looking at here at the racetrack,” he said. “But we tried to be patient and take it all one problem at a time.”
When the state earmarked the money to help revive its racetracks three years later, the headliner quickly became North Wilkesboro Speedway, which had been abandoned by NASCAR and Smith in 1996. Thanks to the work of Dale Earnhardt Jr., iRacing and the kinder, gentler resurrection and promotional wizardry of Smith’s son, Marcus, who took over SMI after his father’s death in 2022, the North Wilkesboro comeback to impossibly host the NASCAR All-Star Race was both fast and fascinating. Same for Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium, which was upfitted by NASCAR for February’s Clash.
While the auto racing world reveled in what was happening at those two North Carolina bullrings, the folks back home at Rockingham were blowing up my phone, all with the same question: If NASCAR can go back there, why the hell can’t they come back here?!
Now, it is. And it is doing so because Lovenheim is doing what others before him did not. He has hired professionals who specialize in racetrack revivals and race publicity and either done what they tell him to do or simply got out of their way.
Illinois-based Track Enterprises is the outfit that upfit the once-seemingly doomed legendary likes of the Milwaukee Mile and the Nashville Fairgrounds. When I talked to Track Enterprises’ Robert Sargent on Tuesday, he was rolling around The Rock with his checklist, everything from affixing signs to suite doors and the final fastening of $1 million worth of SAFER barriers to the walls, to the trimming of the infield grass and painting every flat surface to be found on the 244-acre grounds. Meanwhile, the state of North Carolina has been plastered with Rock billboards. Last month at Martinsville Speedway, Michael McDowell‘s Cup car carried a livery promoting the Rockingham race weekend.
“This is what we do,” Sargent breathlessly explained, saying he’ll sleep plenty after Easter Sunday, but not much before. “We do it because we love racing, but the best part is seeing what it means to the community. Every time I turn around, there’s a new Rockingham resident standing there, asking what they can do to help. That’s how much they care.”
So, Mr. Sargent, how do you respond?
“I’ll take all the help I can get. But I also tell them the best thing they can do for us is to enjoy the race weekend. Take it all in. That’s why we are here.”
By all indications, there are plenty who are taking him up on that offer. Saturday’s Xfinity race is already being touted as a sellout with more than 26,000 tickets purchased (although they’ll find somewhere for you if you show up, trust me) and the promotional push has shifted to Friday afternoon’s Trucks race.
Now the question many are asking, back home and everywhere else for that matter, is where does that push go from here? If this Rockingham comeback weekend takes the checkered flag without any significant issues, could the Cup Series return? For a Clash? For an All-Star Race? Maybe even for a 79th points-paying event? NASCAR executive vice president Ben Kennedy, great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France and the man behind the sanctioning body’s willingness to try so many new and old scheduling ideas in recent seasons, has recently hinted that this weekend might very well be an audition for the old oval on the side of U.S. 1.
It was on April 23, 1965, that Bryan Land’s grandfather and Harold Brasington announced they would host their first NASCAR event later that fall. Almost 60 years to the day, their track will be busy once again.
“It’s hard not to think about the possibilities for the future,” Land said as he was about to head back out once again to check on the track. “But right now I think we all are just excited to see racing at The Rock this weekend. I think everyone is. Because we weren’t sure it was going to happen again. We’ve been here before. But this time …”
It feels different?
“Yes, sir. And that feels good.”
LAS VEGAS — Former NASCAR star Tony Stewart won the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals on Sunday for his first career Top Fuel victory.
The 53-year-old Stewart had a winning run of 3.870 seconds at 317.42 mph at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He held off Antron Brown at the finish, and also beat Justin Ashley and Jasmine Salinas in the final.
“You sure as hell appreciate it more when you struggle like we did,” said Stewart, who won the NASCAR Cup Series championships as a driver in both 2002 and 2005.
“All the credit goes to this team. I’m so proud of my guys. There’s so many great partners here and I have a great team standing there. I have a feeling I’m really going to be hurting in the morning, but it sure as hell is going to be worth it.”
Austin Prock topped the Funny Car field and Dallas Glenn won in Pro Stock.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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