NASCAR Winston Cup Track History
The track held at least one Cup race each year from 1958 to 1984.
A capacity crowd of 13,998 watched Joe Weatherly win the first NASCAR race on August 10, 1958.
Geoff Bodine beat Darrell Waltrip for his second career win in the last Winston Cup race at the track.
NASCAR left the track because the grandstands are too small, and because of a dispute over who would manage the track took place prior to the start of the 1985 season. As of 2012, NASCAR's highest level of competition (now called the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series) has not returned to a track in the Nashville market.
Of the 42 Cup races, Richard Petty has nine wins, with Darrell Waltrip right behind with eight wins. Waltrip won 5 of 6 races between 1981 and 1984. Waltrip's victory in the 1988 Busch Series event gives him the career best nine wins total at the track. Counting NASCAR, USAC, ASA, and local track races, Waltrip holds the all-time track record for wins with 67.
Read more about this topic: Fairgrounds Speedway
Famous quotes containing the words cup, track and/or history:
“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He was good-natured to a degree of weakness, even to tears, upon the slightest occasions. Exceedingly timorous, both personally and politically, dreading the least innovation, and keeping, with a scrupulous timidity, in the beaten track of business as having the safest bottom.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)