Hickory Motor Speedway is a short track located in Hickory, North Carolina. It is one of stock car racing's most storied venues, and is often referred to as "The World's Most Famous Short Track" and the "Birthplace of the NASCAR Stars".
The track first opened in 1951 as a {{convert/{{{2}}}|1/2\Mi|0|||||||r=re|d=LoffAoffDbSon|s=}} dirt track. Gwyn Staley won the first race at the speedway and later became the first track champion. Drivers such as Junior Johnson, and Ralph Earnhardt also became track champions in the 1950s, Earnhardt alone winning five of them.
In 1953, NASCAR's Grand National Series (later the Sprint Cup) visited the track for the first time. Tim Flock won the first race at the speedway, which became a regular part of the Grand National Schedule. After winning his track championship in 1952, Junior Johnson became the most successful Grand National driver at Hickory, winning there seven times.
The track has been re-configured three times in its history. The track became a .4-mile (643.738 meters) dirt track in 1955, which was paved for the first time during the 1967 season. In 1970, Hickory was shortened a second time to its present length of .363 miles (584.192 meters).
Hickory was dropped from the Grand National schedule after the 1971 season when R. J. Reynolds began sponsoring the series and dropped all races under 250 miles (402.336 kilometers) from the schedule. It remained in use as a popular NASCAR Late Model Sportsman Series venue. When the series was reformed as the Budweiser Late Model Series (later the Busch Series and Nationwide Series) in 1982, Hickory played a prominent part of its first season, hosting six of the series' 28 races. Drivers Jack Ingram and Tommy Houston, two former track champions, each won eight times at the track in the Busch Series.
As more tracks began hosting Nationwide Series races, Hickory's involvement was progressively reduced to two races a year by 1987, and then just the Easter weekend by 1995. By 1998, the Nationwide Series began adding more races at Sprint Cup Series tracks, and Hickory was dropped from the schedule after 17 years.
Hickory is still used as a venue for NASCAR's club racing division, the Whelen All-American Series. The USAR Hooters Pro Cup also features a race at the track.
Famous quotes containing the words hickory, motor and/or speedway:
“Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,
Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,
Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,
Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field.”
—Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943)
“What shall we do with country quiet now?
A motor drones insanely in the blue
Like a bad bird in a dream.”
—Babette Deutsch (1895–1982)
“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)