Columbia Speedway: Where NASCAR Turned on the Lights

The oval at two thousand and one Charleston Highway in Cayce is half a mile around. It looks like a lot of old short tracks in the South: a modest grandstand, a dirt infield that has since been paved, the kind of place where the noise on a Saturday night could carry for miles.

But this particular oval has a specific claim in the history of American motorsport. On the night of June sixteenth, nineteen fifty-one, Columbia Speedway became the site of the first NASCAR Grand National race ever held under electric lights. Racing had been a daytime activity. Night racing at this level had not happened. On that Saturday night in Cayce, it did.

Columbia Speedway ran NASCAR's top series from nineteen fifty-one through nineteen seventy-one. For most of those years the track was dirt, and it was here that a young driver from Level Cross, North Carolina, named Richard Petty ran one of his earliest NASCAR Convertible Division races in July of nineteen fifty-eight. He did not win. He came back the following year, on July eighteenth, nineteen fifty-nine, and won his first NASCAR Convertible Division race at this track.

As NASCAR moved away from dirt racing in the late nineteen sixties, the speedway was paved in an effort to keep the Grand National dates. It held its last two Grand National races in nineteen seventy-one. It closed permanently in nineteen seventy-five.

The track still exists physically, the oval still intact, though not suitable for competition. It has been used for events and reunions. In two thousand and nine, a reunion drew close to thirty thousand people.

In a sport that has spent decades chasing corporate modernity, this half-mile oval in Cayce quietly holds some of the most specific firsts that NASCAR's early years produced.