Dale Earnhardt Jr. Revived NASCAR's Most Iconic Ghost Track, But Can It Live Up to the Nostalgia?
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North Wilkesboro Speedway was dead. The NASCAR Cup Series hadn’t competed at the rural North Carolina track since 1996, and no one else had since a brief revival of late model racing in 2010 and 2011. After that, it became a ghost track like any other: abandoned, with buildings crumbling and weeds peeking through every crack.
But unlike any other ghost track, people couldn’t let Wilkesboro go.
One of those people was retired NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., who advocated for years to revive the track. Despite being on the first-ever Cup Series calendar in 1949—before it was even called the “Cup Series”—and staying for nearly 50 years, new tracks eventually took Wilkesboro’s place. This weekend, thanks in large part to Earnhardt, it gets that place back for the Cup Series’ annual All-Star Race.
“I'm getting antsy, getting a little anxiety, getting excited,” Earnhardt told Road & Track. “There are a lot of people who want to save a lot of things that have been left abandoned, but rarely do you see that kind of stuff make a comeback.”
That comeback began on a cold and rainy day in December 2019, when a group led by Earnhardt showed up at North Wilkesboro with farm equipment and weed-eaters. The track needed a major cleanup before it could be scanned and virtually created for iRacing, a simulator used by amateurs and pros alike. At the time, Earnhardt and iRacing framed it as a last-ditch effort to immortalize a dying facility.
“It won’t be here much longer, as it continues to decay,” Earnhardt said in a short film called Bringing Back Wilkesboro. “If we can take a scan of the surface and the walls, we can go back whenever we want and recreate the racetrack as it was in any year. It’ll be there forever for us to enjoy.”
Everything snowballed from there. iRacing built the track for the public, NASCAR ran a virtual schedule during the pandemic with North Wilkesboro on it, and Earnhardt helped lobby for government funding to renovate the track. In late 2021, the state allotted $18 million for it.
Still, North Wilkesboro wasn’t on the map for Cup racing. Its big return came last August with Earnhardt and the CARS Tour, a late model series he now partially owns. In the race, Earnhardt ran a bright-green Sun Drop No. 3 car, just like he did at Wilkesboro in 1993.
“When we had the late model stock race in August, Marcus Smith, the owner of the property, was standing on the front straightaway,” Earnhardt told R&T. “Seeing the amount of people who were there, and the energy and the vibe and the mood—it gave him the confidence, I think, to really try to bring racing back there in a bigger way.
“Everybody had talked about missing Wilkesboro. Everyone had said all the right things, but he needed to see a sample of what the future might look like. I don't think any of us really knew that was what we were going to experience that night in August.”
The next month, Earnhardt joined Smith to announce NASCAR’s return to Wilkesboro with the All-Star exhibition race in May 2023. But before it could happen, the track needed a safety overhaul to meet Cup standards.
“It’s going to be pretty incredible, the difference between the track six months ago and where it is today,” Earnhardt said. “The racetrack will be modernized. There will be a new SAFER barrier wall, a new catchfence, new paint, new amenities, new grandstands, and improved this and improved that.
“All of that stuff is absolutely necessary, but it will visually change what the track is today compared to what it was in August. We just have to remember: We couldn't move forward and have racing at that racetrack with the way it was.”
Now that Wilkesboro is back, it faces a new challenge: living up to the nostalgia. (Since R&T spoke to Earnhardt, reality has set in. Parts of the track’s decades-old surface have peeled up and damaged cars, while NASCAR spotters brought up a safety concern: They couldn't see the full track from their viewing stand, so NASCAR had to raise it.)
“I hope that nostalgia and genuine happiness that everybody has, that you still feel that when you go there,” Earnhardt said. “I think that that's certainly a concern of mine, is like: ‘Hey, I don't think we'll ever be able to recreate what happened in August.’
“In terms of size, we'll be able to pack the place out. But will we have that same emotional experience? I don't know if we'll ever be able to do that again, but we’re going to try to come close.”
Ghost tracks—and former ghost tracks, like Wilkesboro—are a big passion for Earnhardt, whose Peacock show Lost Speedways tours the country to explore them. It’s a way to memorialize tracks with little hope of coming back, since many either get reclaimed by the weeds or bulldozed for real-estate projects.
A recent feature on the show was Texas World Speedway, a gargantuan 2-mile oval being torn down and turned into a neighborhood one chunk at a time. The neighborhood streets are mostly named after NASCAR tracks, including “Wilkesboro Drive.”
“I never got to see that track until we did a Lost Speedways episode on it,” Earnhardt said. “It was the weirdest thing, sitting there with half of the track in front of you and half of it gone. It was like looking in the refrigerator and seeing a half cake.”
For all of his efforts, Earnhardt won’t compete in the All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro. He’s regularly said that six years into retirement, he’s too old and out of the routine to compete in the Cup Series.
Instead, Earnhardt’s returning to his roots. He drove his Sun Drop throwback car in the CARS Tour race at Wilkesboro on Wednesday night, finishing 16th with damage from a wreck.
“It's been fun to do that, because it's a lot less pressure,” Earnhardt told R&T. “When I was young, racing at the grassroots level, I was terrified. Worried. Worried I wasn't going to get there, worried I wasn't going to make it to the big time. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to, so I'm kind of giving myself this second chance.
“Now, I don't have to worry about making it. I don't have to worry about becoming a Cup Series driver. I can go to the track and enjoy it.”
The root of NASCAR—and often, life—is nostalgia. We consider the good ol’ days to be better than the ones to come, without recognizing that eventually, these will be the good ol’ days too. Wilkesboro was once a lost track, saved only by a yearning for what we lost with it (and some government funding).
No matter what the future holds, North Wilkesboro came back from the dead—a reminder that nothing we love is truly gone unless we let it go.
“Honestly, I didn't think we'd ever be here,” he said. “It's been a long process, and it's still a bit surreal. This is actually happening. We're going to have Cup action on that racetrack.”
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