Talladega: The Track That Was Built in Sixty-Three Days

Talladega Superspeedway is one of the biggest motorsports venues in the world, and it was built in about sixteen months. That tells you something about what was driving NASCAR in the late nineteen sixties.

The track opened on September fourteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, on a site in Talladega County, Alabama that had been farmland. Bill France Senior, the founder and president of NASCAR, had pushed for a superspeedway that would surpass Daytona in scale and speed. The circuit he built is two point six six miles around, banked at thirty-three degrees in the turns, and when it opened, drivers were posting speeds above two hundred miles per hour in qualifying runs, which was higher than the tires of the era were rated to handle safely.

The Professional Drivers Association, led by Richard Petty, boycotted the inaugural race over tire safety concerns. France brought in replacement drivers and held the race anyway. A driver named Richard Brickhouse won. Petty and most of the established stars did not compete until the tire issue was addressed.

In the decades that followed, Talladega became known as the most unpredictable track in NASCAR. The banking and the draft allow cars to reach speeds that no other oval produces. The tight drafting packs that form on the long straightaways produce spectacular multicar crashes that have become part of the track's identity. Drivers speak of the Big One, a phrase that refers to the massive wrecks that Talladega seems to manufacture at regular intervals.

Roughly eighty thousand permanent seats ring the oval, and the huge infield fills with campers. On race weekends, it functions as one of the largest temporary cities in Alabama.