Michigan International Speedway

Tucked into the Irish Hills of Jackson County, Michigan International Speedway is one of the fastest oval tracks in North American racing.

Groundbreaking came on September twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-seven. Detroit-area land developer Lawrence LoPatin built the two-mile D-shaped oval at an estimated cost of between four and six million dollars, and the track opened in October nineteen sixty-eight. The inaugural event was a United States Auto Club two-hundred-fifty-mile championship race, and the winner that day was Ronnie Bucknam.

NASCAR arrived the following summer. The first Cup Series race ran on June fifteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, and it ended in dramatic fashion. LeeRoy Yarbrough held the lead deep into the final lap before spinning and crashing just three hundred yards from the finish line. Cale Yarborough slipped through to take the checkered flag and write his name into the track's first chapter.

Michigan's two-mile layout and sweeping high-banked turns produce some of the highest speeds in stock-car racing. Average speeds routinely exceed two hundred miles per hour during qualifying, making it one of the few venues where passing in the draft becomes genuinely dangerous. Drivers often describe it as a place that separates cars that are merely fast from cars that are truly aerodynamically sorted.

Roger Penske purchased the track in nineteen seventy-three, and it has remained in Penske's portfolio ever since. The facility sits about seventy miles west of Detroit in Brooklyn, Michigan, a village that swells on race weekends from a few hundred residents to more than seventy thousand fans.

Over the decades Michigan has hosted some of the sport's defining moments, including years of competition from Championship Auto Racing Teams, CART, during the nineteen eighties and beyond. The track remains a late-summer fixture on the NASCAR Cup calendar.