Charlotte Motor Speedway: Cathedral of Speed

Just off Interstate Eighty-Five north of Charlotte sits a one-and-a-half-mile oval that has been the spiritual home of NASCAR racing since nineteen sixty. Charlotte Motor Speedway was built by a partnership that included Bruton Smith and the racing driver Curtis Turner, who raised money in a period when NASCAR was barely a decade old and stock-car racing was still regarded in much of the country as a regional novelty.

The construction nearly ended before it began. Turner and Smith ran out of money midway through building, and the track opened in nineteen sixty in an unfinished state, with the infield a muddy mess and grandstands incomplete. Turner was separately banned from NASCAR competition for four years by NASCAR founder Bill France Senior after he tried to organize drivers into a Teamsters-affiliated union in nineteen sixty-one, a move France viewed as an existential threat to his control of the sport. The track itself went through bankruptcy and did not stabilize until Bruton Smith bought back control in the nineteen seventies.

What followed was a reinvention. Smith poured money into the facility, adding condominiums along the backstretch in nineteen eighty-four, the first such permanent residences at any racetrack in the world. He added lights in nineteen ninety-two, making Charlotte the first superspeedway to host a night race, the Coca-Cola Six Hundred by day and the Winston by night. The combination event drew enormous television audiences and cemented the track's flagship status.

The Coca-Cola Six Hundred, run every Memorial Day weekend, is the longest race in NASCAR at six hundred miles, and it has been held here every year since nineteen sixty. The All-Star Race, which ran here for decades before moving temporarily, remains one of NASCAR's marquee events.

For a sport born on dirt ovals and Daytona Beach, Charlotte Motor Speedway is where NASCAR became a billion-dollar industry.