The history is possibly more exciting than the racing itself when it comes to a historical place like North Wilkesboro Speedway.
The NASCAR All-Star Race is set to take place at NWS for the third time this Sunday, after the track was reopened in 2023 after decades of sitting dormant on the side of highway 421. Of course, it’s one of the very first-ever NASCAR tracks, and hosted races there before the entity itself was founded. Located in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, stock car racing started there mostly by accident, as moonshiners would race through the hills trying to evade the law during prohibition in order to get their moonshine to people in other parts of the state and country.
Eventually, they wised up and started souping up their cars in order to easily outrun the law, and with a few trick maneuvers, it became pretty easy for them to get out of sight quickly. Eventually, it turned into the professional sport we know and love today as NASCAR. No other professional sport in America has a formation story as cool as that….
And the making and running of moonshine certainly didn’t die after prohibition… it’s still alive and well to this day, albeit on a much smaller scale. In fact, less than 10 years ago back in 2016, Dean Combs, a former NASCAR driver and former crew chief for notorious moonshiner-turned-professional driver himself, Junior Johnson, was busted more than once for a massive moonshine operation.
First, he was raided in 2009 by NC ALE agents, who couldn’t carry the still out of his garage, eventually dragged it up the hill with a truck and blew it up, and people could feel the explosion 12 or so miles away, so you can imagine the kind of rumors and stories that stirred up among locals.
There were reports last year that officials had discovered a secret moonshine cave under the speedway, though I’m more convinced it was probably a sinkhole, and this story is way cooler anyways…
His operation sat right outside of North Wilkesboro Speedway in an unassuming shed, where Dean, whose father used to own NWS, continued to produce hundreds of gallons of moonshine. And not just for people in North Carolina, but for people as far away as Pennsylvania. When he was raided again in 2016, agents said there was a 300 gallon still and 2,100 gallons of mash in the works.
They only charged him with manufacturing moonshine, which is only a misdemeanor, and typically the biggest penalty for something like that is the state tax they enforce for making the illegal liquor. Of course, the government’s gonna make you pay one way or another.
Somehow, the law got tipped off because a guy who knew him was trying to save himself, and did so by spilling the tea moonshine about what Combs had going on. According to a great story by Jeremy Markovich, state Alcohol Law Enforcement agent Shon Tally had an informant in the next county over, and it obviously didn’t end great for Combs.
He had him go knock on Dean’s door, and after relaying the fact that the scent of moonshine was so strong he almost fell over, it didn’t take long for agents to show up. When Dean opened the door, he insisted he had no liquor store inside. They went back and forth, and eventually, Dean let them come in,
It was a fresh batch, and agents seized 200 gallons of corn liquor, in addition to an old Ryder truck used to haul it. Oh, and those 3,000 pounds of sugar they also took? It was donated it to the local school district… you can’t make this stuff up.
BUT, they weren’t able to haul such a big load out themselves, so Dean dragged it up to the top of the hill himself, where it was eventually blown up, and people a dozen miles away reportedly felt the boom. And at the time, Combs said he wasn’t in it for the money instead he wanted to perfect his craft and open his own distillery. He’s not sure that will happen now.
He told WSOCTV that mostly, after the raid, a lot of “work went down the drain”:
“A lot of work went down the drain. A whole lot of work went down the drain. It’s a heritage through my family. It was their life. That’s the way we were raised.”
Dean joked that while, yes, they did blow up one of his stills in the 2009 raid, he still has the other one… joke’s on them, I guess.
Before the March 2009 raid, it had been a year and a half since the law had found a moonshine still in Wilkes County. Firstly and mostly, people don’t rat each other out, and people are pretty secretive about selling moonshine… it’s one of those, if you know, you know kind of things. Lot of reasons. The agents have mostly moved on to things like busting underaged kids, and they have much more on their plates now, in addition to the fact that most people aren’t making it like they used to, either. If they are, it’s on a much smaller scale, of course.
That second raid was pushing 10 years ago now, and there’s no telling if he’s still in the moonshine business, but I’d love to have a drink with him (of his own creation, of course), because I can only imagine all the stories he could tell that would never make it to the news.
