The Madhouse: Bowman Gray Stadium and the Birth of NASCAR
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
The quarter-mile oval you are near is the oldest weekly stock car racing track in the country. Bowman Gray Stadium has been running races since nineteen forty-nine, the same year NASCAR was formally organized, and it has not missed a season since.
The stadium itself predates racing by more than a decade. It was built in nineteen thirty-seven as a public works project during the Great Depression, originally constructed as a football field. The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company executive Bowman Gray had left a philanthropic legacy in Winston-Salem, and when his widow Nathalie donated thirty five thousand dollars toward the stadium's original one hundred thousand dollar construction cost, the facility was named in his honor.
NASCAR's founder Bill France Sr. arrived in nineteen forty-nine and recognized immediately that this tight quarter-mile track inside a football stadium was unlike anything else on the circuit. Conventional superspeedways rewarded horsepower. Bowman Gray rewarded wheel-to-wheel aggression and nerve. NASCAR Hall of Famer Tim Flock won the first track championship that year.
From nineteen fifty-eight to nineteen seventy-one, the stadium hosted twenty-eight events in NASCAR's premier series. Drivers who raced here in those years include Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, and Ned Jarrett. The track's tight confines and banked turns produced constant contact and chaos, and fans gave it a nickname that has stuck: The Madhouse.
Today Bowman Gray still runs weekly Friday night racing under the lights, drawing crowds of several thousand to watch late-model stock cars and modified racers pound each other through turns barely wide enough for two cars side by side. It is one of the last places in American motorsports where you can watch racing the way it looked in nineteen forty-nine, on a track that was already old when Bill France Sr. first pulled in.
