Hickory Motor Speedway: Birthplace of NASCAR Stars

You are rolling past one of the most hallowed pieces of pavement in American motorsport. Hickory Motor Speedway opened in nineteen fifty-two as a half-mile dirt oval carved out of the Catawba County foothills, and it almost immediately became the school where a generation of NASCAR legends earned their diplomas.

The place earned its unofficial motto, the Birthplace of NASCAR Stars, through sheer, repeated proof. Gwyn Staley won the very first race and became the first track champion. Then Junior Johnson stepped into the picture, claiming the championship in nineteen fifty-two before going on to win seven Cup Series races at the same facility. But no family wrote itself into Hickory's story more completely than the Earnhardts. Ralph Earnhardt, a Kannapolis textile worker who raced on weekends, won five consecutive track championships here in the nineteen fifties, becoming the king of the short tracks. His son Dale inherited the instinct and the ferocity, and later won five track championships of his own at Hickory.

NASCAR's top series came to the speedway for the first time in nineteen fifty-three. Tim Flock won that inaugural Cup race, and the Grand National schedule would return to Hickory for thirty-five Cup events through nineteen seventy-one. By nineteen fifty-six the track had been cut down to four-tenths of a mile and in nineteen sixty-seven it was finally paved, giving late-model racers the tight, high-banked surface it still wears today.

The scale of what Hickory produced is staggering for a track this size. Beyond the Earnhardts and Junior Johnson, Ned Jarrett honed his craft here before winning two Cup championships. The cramped, unforgiving short track rewarded feel and instinct over horsepower, exactly the kind of racing education that translated directly to superspeedway dominance.

Today, just north of the track on US Seventy, you can still hear engines on race nights echoing off the same hills that watched Ralph Earnhardt learn to be fearless. The speedway continues to run weekly racing, a living museum where the next generation of stars is still proving itself on the same dirt, now paved, that made legends.