Oxford Plains Speedway is a 3/8 mile racetrack in Oxford, Maine, USA. Established in 1950, the track was originally a half mile before being shortened to a 3/8 mile track later on in the track's history. It has been home to various NASCAR Nationwide Series events, including the True Value Oxford 250, Oxford 250 and True Value 250. With 14,000 seats, the speedway has the largest seating capacity of any sporting venue in Maine. The main race held there is the TD Bank 250 which is an American Canadian Tour race. These 250 lap events have held many major NASCAR drivers including Matt Kenseth, Denny Hamlin, Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick, Ricky Craven, Kenny Wallace, Steven Wallace, Geoff Bodine, Brad Keselowski, Terry Labonte, Kevin Lepage, Brett Bodine, Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, Dale Jarrett, Jimmy Spencer, Rusty Wallace, Davey Allison, Morgan Shepard, Todd Bodine, Jeff Burton, Bobby Labonte, Joe Nemechek, Ward Burton, Martin Truex, Sr., Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch, Trevor Bayne and J.J. Yeley.
The speedway is also known around Maine for yearly hosting two American Canadian Tour Races a year, and for its motor mayhem events that include smokey doughnut shows, spectator drags, jack and jill races, enduros, and formally had the ramp jump that has been discontinued for safety reasons.
The stadium held The Monsters of Rock Festival, featuring Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica & Kingdom Come, on June 25, 1988. A show on the 24th was cancelled.
The Grateful Dead performed, on two consecutive nights, at the racetrack on July 2–3, 1988, with Little Feat as their opening act.
Famous quotes containing the words oxford, plains and/or speedway:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota: hoping that droughts will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping ... that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)