He doesn’t miss.
For the first time in 30 years, NASCAR Cup Series points racing is officially returning to North Wilkesboro Speedway on Sunday.
The inaugural Window World 450 will be the first championship points-paying Cup Series race at the historic track since September 29th, 1996, and it’s been a long, nearly improbable journey to get there, but it’s been worth it. There have hosted the non-points All-Star Race for the last three years, in 2023, 2024, and 2025, but having a points race there was the ultimate dream, and it’s finally happening.
Of course, the history in the area is rich with tales of moonshiners and the sport was shaped by men running from the law during the prohibition era, and they started souping up their vehicles to be able to outrun the cops, and alas, a uniquely Southern sport was born.
And one man in particular is owed a lot of thanks for helping bring all of this to life, and that would be the great Dale Earnhardt Jr. He was really the first prominent figure in the sport to stir this idea up and get people talking on socials, and he really led the charge in terms of keeping his foot on the gas (pun very much intended) in terms of not letting the idea.
Eventually, he raced in a grassroots race there (and fittingly finished in 3rd), and it all started with a weed wacker and a dream:
It wasn’t so much a weed-whacker as it was a magic wand. Congrats @dalejr and all involved. #NorthWilkesboro pic.twitter.com/RUSnUaSnzj
— nascarcasm (@nascarcasm) August 31, 2022
And ahead of this weekend’s race big, Jr. spoked with Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic, Jr. explained that the “short track racing” has largely been abandoned by NASCAR, which of course, are the tracks that made the sport long before the superspeedways of today were established and reigned supreme:
“It’s not so much Wilkesboro; it’s the vintage atmosphere and what being at a race at Wilkesboro feels like. It’s the experience that you get when you’re at Wilkesboro. It’s short track racing, which we have sort of abandoned in a lot of areas of our industry. We’ve lost that.
And I’ve talked to (NASCAR CEO) Steve O’Donnell and they’re anxious to sort of reestablish what’s been lost there and what’s eroded away.”
Couldn’t have said it any better. He just gets it.
The sport has been criticized for decades now about how they really have abandoned their roots in search of some other demographic of people to make fans, when ironically, leaning into the foundation of the sport is exactly what makes it special.
As Jr. put it, Cup Series racing is a “five-star dish and the perfect recipe has all the right ingredients,” it’s just been putting it all together that has proved to be a challenge for those at the top (even though fans have been screaming it forever):
“I just feel like NASCAR Cup Series racing is a five-star dish and the perfect recipe has all the right ingredients. And we’ve been missing a little bit of what short tracks deliver for our series and our sport to be as healthy as it possibly can be and for that dish to be perfect.
What is the right combination of short tracks, intermediates, road courses? That’s debatable, and everybody’s got a different opinion.”
Jr. will be in the booth as the lead TV analyst as TNT Sports broadcasts this race, and he is so excited to be able to be part of it, saying it will be “emotional” for him and he’s excited to be there and hopefully remember some wonderful childhood memories:
“I’d be missing out. I’d have some FOMO, for sure. It’s one of those things where the universe is just kind of working in your favor. We got really fortunate for it to fall in this little window that I’m actually working the booth.
It’ll be really emotional, and I’m sure a lot of new memories that I haven’t really uncovered yet from my time there as a kid.”
Jr. says, even though we can all see he has a lot of influence on the sport, it doesn’t feel that way. Of course, things like this are huge, but he explained that there are tons of other things he’d like to see change that he just can’t make happen:
“It doesn’t feel like that. I feel like it is really hard to make things happen. You mentioned a couple things that I might have had some influence on, but there’s 1,000 things that I wanted to happen that didn’t. It doesn’t feel like I have my hand on a lever or I can just reach over and mash a button.
I talk to O’Donnell, and I talk to different people in the sport about things that I think are important, and I worry about whether my input is effective or if it’s heard.
Now, there’s some things you can influence, and there’s some times when you can be a good influence on things. But other times, it’s out of your hands, and you just have to buy in and embrace change that necessarily isn’t change that you wanted, but it’s just change that’s going to happen, whether you like it or not.”
They would really be smart to, though. I can’t thank him enough for really helping make this an actual possibility, and see it through to now a points race actually happening.
He was more than right about all of this… the race is completely sold out, and people have been camping out there since the first day it was open to do so. Jr. has pointed out more than once how important the nostalgia factor is when it comes to racing, and this is certainly the pinnacle of nostalgia and I think it will be really fun to watch on TV for those who don’t know much about it.
If you want to know what NASCAR is all about, this is the race to find out. The history, nostalgia, the town’s love for the sport and track and the modern day cars racing for real points will all meet at the same moment, and it makes for easily the most special NASCAR race we’ve seen in a very long time, so I’d highly recommend tuning in if you can.
The History Of Moonshine And North Wilkesboro Speedway
The track first opened in 1947 as a dirt track in rural Wilkes county, at the inception of the sport, and was later paved in 1958 and ran some of the biggest races in NASCAR up until the last Winston Cup Series race in 1996.
NASCAR clearly had humble beginnings in Wilkes and the surrounding counties, as it was then-known as the Moonshine Capital of America (and it probably still is, not gonna lie). In the prohibition era, people would run moonshine up and down the mountains, which often meant having to outrun the law so they could sell their illegal liquor.
Over time, they learned how to soup their cars up and make them run as fast as possible so they wouldn’t get caught, and eventually, the sport we know as NASCAR today was born.
The sport was not only a huge source of entertainment for people from all over the country who traveled to watch races there, but it also brought a lot to the economy in a town that, like so many small towns across the country, has seen a lot of its big industries leave.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. has also played a massive role in getting everything reopen, and he put out a fantastic series on his YouTube page called Roots & Revival series, which focuses on all of the history of the track, that I’d highly recommended watching for some more insight.
