The resurrection of the North Wilkesboro Speedway — and the larger hope it represents

These were some of the scenes of resurrection here last Wednesday, 11 days before the first NASCAR race in more than 26 years at the North Wilkesboro Speedway:

A woman walking around with a race car driver’s autograph in black marker on her forehead. And on her baby’s forehead, too, in something straight out of “Talladega Nights.” People, young and old, slowly walking around the five-eighths-of-a-mile track, gawking while they paced along the cracked asphalt, rough with time, small lines of tar covering up where the weeds used to climb through, back when this place was abandoned and left for dead.

No shortage of selfies along the checkered starting line, or with the flag stand in the background. Plenty of folks in faded old T-shirts with images of Earnhardt and Petty, or commemorating some long-ago race in this forgotten place. An older man in cut-off jean shorts, no shirt, a Budweiser tie, with a backwards hat and a long white beard, taking long, deep sips of beer, drinking it in along with everything else about this particular moment, savoring it.

Someone asked him if he’d be here for the race.

“If I wake up breathin’,” the man said in a hoarse drawl right out of these Wilkes County hills.

There was all of that and more at what the organizers of the event called an Open House, a chance for the North Wilkesboro community and race fans and whomever else to come out to the old speedway, somehow back to life now — somehow brought back from the dead — and walk it and touch it and see it up close. This was a party; food trucks and music and a whole scene to celebrate the arrival of the NASCAR All-Star race at the North Wilkesboro Speedway on Sunday, the first NASCAR race in 9,731 days at one of the sport’s original tracks, in a place that helped start it all.

And down near the starting line amid all of it here last Wednesday, among the mother and child with autographs on their foreheads; among the music and revelry; among the old man with the long beard and Budweiser tie over his bare chest, there was Mike Staley, wearing a wry smile while he took in everything all around him, the likes of which he swore he’d never see again.

“You can’t put it into words,” he said, though he tried.

North Wilkesboro’s abrupt end

In the photograph, now more than 70 years old, Staley is lying on a blanket on the hood of a race car. Maybe that was his first visit to the North Wilkesboro Speedway. He cannot remember that far back into his childhood, almost into infancy, but he can remember what happened a few years later, when he was about 5. He can still see it.

“Mama took me down there,” said Staley, now 73, looking back, and really he was scared. Everything felt so big. The track, which was still red clay dirt in those days, and the cars, and the drivers. Especially the drivers, all muscle and tobacco-stained might. “I was real shy.”

He stood near his mom, a bashful little boy. She leaned down and offered encouragement.

“Go on up and tell them who your daddy is,” she said.

“Enoch’s my daddy,” Staley said at the gate, and that’s the first time he remembers seeing the track.

Enoch Staley, Mike’s father, was one of the founders of the North Wilkesboro Speedway. He was among those, too, responsible for the beginning of NASCAR itself, and for 50 years he remained a co-owner of the speedway, a caretaker of the place. Mike Staley practically grew up there, riding in the heavy lumber trucks that used to pack down the dirt; later guiding his bike around the oval, the wind in his eyes; spending many a race day or night consuming an untold number of barbecue sandwiches, ones so good he can still smell them.

Then one day in September of 1996 it was all over. North Wilkesboro’s last NASCAR race. A young Jeff Gordon won the Tyson Holly Farms 400. Dale Earnhardt finished second. The track where stock car racing essentially started, one that nurtured its maturation from its moonshine-running roots to the billion-dollar phenomenon it became, shut down. North Wilkesboro’s two NASCAR races went to tracks a long ways away from the hills and stills of Wilkes County. Bruton Smith, then in charge of Speedway Motorsports, came to fully own the speedway and allowed it to rot.

And rot it did, for the better part of 25 years. Vegetation pushed its way through the track, nature slowly reclaiming what it once owned. Buildings, ones that used to house writers and dignitaries who’d gather to watch the spectacle while locals occasionally passed moonshine, began to crumble, the walls falling in on themselves. In the spring and summer, when the trees and brush were at their greenest and most robust, it came hard to see the old grandstand peeking over U.S. 421. A place Tom Wolfe immortalized in Esquire in 1965 fell into ruin. It became a ghost track.

“Coming down here,” Staley said, “was like taking a bandage off a wound. It hurt every time I saw the buildings falling down.”

‘We kept the rust’

Now look. Those same buildings that caved in on themselves have somehow risen from the ground. The safety fence that once sagged over the track, collecting rust and hanging lower and lower, has been restored. There’s fresh paint everywhere — though not too fresh, or bright, because Speedway Motorsports, which has tried to make good after all these years of abandonment, still wanted things to look retro and old-school.

And so some of the old signs and branding remain: The big “Winston Cup Series” logo outside — long after Winston ceased being a sponsor — next to the old ad for Coca-Cola, now updated with a new coat of red and white paint. The goal was to restore the speedway to how it might’ve looked the day it last hosted a NASCAR race in 1996, which is really how it looked in 1976, or ‘56, and if they got nothing else right they nailed the aesthetic.

Somebody not long ago told Marcus Smith, the CEO of Speedway Motorsports, that they managed to turn a field of weeds into a field of dreams. In about a year, North Wilkesboro went from inhabitable, a facility without plumbing and with practically no modern infrastructure, to this moment of restoration and, in a way, redemption. There’s new lighting, fast Wi-Fi, toilets that flush and water that runs, after the county laid water and sewer lines.

“But we kept the character of the place,” Smith said. “We kept the rust.”

Smith is the son of Bruton Smith who, for a long time, was a cursed name in this county. A hated and despised name. It was the elder Smith, along with another track owner named Bob Bahre, who was most responsible for NASCAR moving out of here after the fall of ‘96. North Wilkesboro went from hosting two annual races to hosting none, and the worst was yet to come. The track’s closure soon became a metaphor for a dying town in a dying region. Despair set in.

Lowe’s, whose corporate headquarters were long a point of pride around Wilkes County, relocated near Charlotte in the early 2000s. Carolina Mirror, once the largest mirror manufacturer in the world, shut down. Good jobs became scarce, opportunities dried up. Wilkes County transformed into such an archetype for struggling small-town America that The New York Times sent a reporter to North Wilkesboro in 2016 to do one of those stories about economic anxiety and the death of the American dream.

“Feeling Let Down and Left Behind, With Little Hope for Better,” was the headline.

All the despair and the start of the decline could be traced to one moment.

“There was a lot of animosity in Wilkes County when they just closed the track,” said Eddie Settle, a Republican state senator who represents that county, along with Alexander, Surry and Yadkin counties. “It was bad.”

Settle won election to the Wilkes County board of commissioners in 2012. That’s when the dream and the goal of reopening the track first came to him. Nobody thought it’d ever happen because there was no reason to think it would. Speedway Motorsports seemed content to let it crumble away on the side of the highway. A website and Internet campaign — “Save the Speedway” — gained traction among fans, but not among those with power to open it back up.

Settle maintained his belief. A few others did, too. And then Teri Parsons joined the movement.

Mending old wounds

Last Wednesday night, while streaks of orange filled the sky and people slowly walked around the track, taking in the history of the place, officials dedicated one side of the grandstand to Junior Johnson, who was something like Elvis on wheels back in the 1960s. “The Last American Hero,” went the profile on him in Esquire, the one that Wolfe wrote that remains one of the best pieces of American sports journalism ever written.

Moments later, on the other side of the track, another grandstand was dedicated to Benny Parsons, a Wilkes County native and favorite son who won here in 1979, and who loved this track the way only a hometown man could love it. Parsons died in 2007 and his wife, Teri, moved to his home county, where she got her first speeding ticket on a highway named in honor of her husband. She’d never thought of herself as a country girl, but here she was, living amid fields that stretched on forever, now alone with her grief and her mourning and a list Benny had left her, his dying wishes.

Maybe she should’ve known that the request was coming, that in the third item on Benny’s list, he asked her to find a way to reopen the North Wilkesboro Speedway. Somehow. Some way.

And so last Wednesday night, when a couple of workers unfurled a big red banner that said “Benny Parsons Grandstand,” Teri stood off to the side a little ways and began to cry. For 17 years, in one form or another, she’d been working toward this moment — first as a peacemaker between the county and Speedway Motorsports, which for a long time from its Charlotte headquarters felt the wrath of a proud yet beaten region.

That was the first step. Mending old wounds. Teri became a conduit between the locals, politicians and others, and the speedway’s ownership. It took years to build momentum. Progress moved so slowly it looked like no progress at all. With a background in tourism and public relations, Teri a few years ago implored locals to make Speedway Motorsports, now under the control of Marcus Smith, feel wanted. The past was the past. The hurt, still there, couldn’t stand in the way.

Soon enough, signs and billboards sprung up all over the county, in yards and storefronts and alongside highways. They carried the North Wilkesboro Speedway logo and a simple, yearning message: “We Want You Back.”

Smith listened. Dale Earnhardt Jr., himself a scholar of the sport in which he made his name, and a North Wilkesboro advocate, offered more hope when he had Smith on his podcast in 2021. They hinted at a future for the speedway, a future that has arrived.

It took all of that — the grassroots campaign and years of backroom politicking; the healing of old scars and the involvement of Dale Jr. — and then it took more. The state of North Carolina, with the approval of the legislature and Gov. Roy Cooper, set aside $14 million in the budget last year to go toward renovating the track. Speedway Motorsports made investments of its own in the millions. And for the past 10 months workers here transformed the place from what it was into what it is, all the while people hoped that maybe their luck really was turning, after all this time.

‘This is home’

That was part of the reason behind Teri Parsons’ tears. Of all the things bearing Benny’s name these days — and he’s been honored with roads and bridges and other structures named after him — “this is home,” Teri said. “This is special.” She looked around at all the people milling about — Benny’s people. Wilkes County people and Western North Carolina people, and people who’ve experienced, in many ways, a great number of losses over the decades, whether in jobs or savings or pride.

For a long time Teri had the sense that a lot of folks around here “weren’t proud of where they were from.” And now, on a warm spring Wednesday night, with the track restored and music in the air and proof beneath their feet that something dead could come back to life, whether a race track or lost hope, “they’re walking a little taller,” Teri said. “And smiling a little more.”

The hope is that this, the speedway’s revitalization and the arrival of the all-star race, is just the beginning. It is, according to Marcus Smith, who has spoken plainly about what he envisions now that the lights turn on and the faucets run, and now that the buildings circling the track are upright again.

“We want this to be a multipurpose entertainment destination,” Smith said last week, and that means that perhaps it could host festivals or concerts or outdoors conventions. There are whispers around here, too, that NASCAR, once in such a hurry to abandon its roots and expand, may come back home full-time. That North Wilkesboro will once again host a Cup race every year, and maybe two.

After the last one, in the fall of ‘96, Mike Staley did what he always did. He acquired the pace car, a black Pontiac Blackbird. It was a tradition for Staley, who every year would trade in the pace car from last year’s race for a new one. This time, with North Wilkesboro hosting a NASCAR race for the final time, Staley simply bought the car and put it in a garage. He wanted to preserve the history, figuring that the speedway would never again host a NASCAR event.

And so the car mostly sat in that garage for more than 26 years, more or less in mint condition, until Staley last week drove it out to the track and parked it right near the starting line. It’d been a long time, almost 70 years, since he’d been too scared to walk in this place; a long time since he rode his bike here or came to recognize the barbecue sandwiches by smell. The past 26 years, though, could’ve felt longer, waiting for something a lot of people around here never thought they’d see.

“It’ll be hard to put into words,” Staley said, again, of what Sunday night would be like, with real, actual stock cars circling the track, the sound of the familiar roar of the engines bouncing off the hills as if it was 1996 again. So much had happened over the past two decades, almost three, and Staley quietly sat behind the old pace car — all analog dials on the inside; “Tyson Holly Farms 400” printed along the passenger door — and just took everything in.

Soon the daylight faded and a light show began — the speedway showing off — and it couldn’t have been a coincidence that while people began walking out that old Thin Lizzy song began playing over the loudspeakers:

Guess who just got back today?

Them wild-eyed boys that had been away

The bitterness that’d lingered for so long was gone, Staley said. He’d healed. The pain he felt every time he’d passed this place, for decades, had been replaced by something else. Hope, maybe. Pride, certainly.

Just about everybody else who’d gathered here could relate.