Legacy of North Wilkesboro Is More than NASCAR, Moonshiners and Junior Johnson

• Now, 75 years after North Wilkesboro Speedway opened, the old track will live again this weekend.
• After a huge refurbishing project, the once-rundown and abandoned track is both new and “old” again.
• It’s the best parts of its moonshine-soaked, old-racer history preserved even as owner Speedway Motorsports tore away the decay and ruin.

When noted journalist and historian Tom Wolfe accepted an assignment from Esquire magazine in the mid-1960s to write about stock car racing, he targeted driver Junior Johnson and North Wilkesboro Speedway as subjects for his typewriter.

This was perfectly done.

Although the giant Daytona International Speedway had been open for six years and NASCAR’s march toward bigger tracks was accelerating, tiny and isolated North Wilkesboro and its local hero—the drawling, brawling Junior Johnson who drove race cars and hauled moonshine in equally talented ways—were ideal representatives of the sport.

In one of the most famous long-form magazine pieces of the 20th century—“The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”—Wolfe set off on a 20,000-word journey to explain this mostly regional sport of fast drivers and faster cars to the masses. He drove to North Wilkesboro on a race day, and this is some of what he saw:

Sitting on the hood of your car was a pretty good perch for watching racing at North Wilkesboro in 1949.

“Sunday! Racing day! Sunday is no longer a big church day in the South. A man can’t very well go to eleven o’clock service and still expect to get to a two-o’clock stock-car race, unless he wants to get into the biggest traffic jam in the history of creation, and that goes for North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, same as Atlanta and Charlotte.

“Seventeen thousand people, me included, all of us driving out Route 421, out to the stock-car races at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, 17,000 going out to a five-eighths-mile stock-car track with a Coca-Cola sign out front.”

Now, 75 years after North Wilkesboro Speedway opened and almost 60 years after Wolfe’s article enhanced stock car racing’s national exposure, the old track will live again this weekend.

After a huge refurbishing project, the once-rundown and abandoned track is both new and “old” again, the best parts of its moonshine-soaked, old-racer history preserved even as owner Speedway Motorsports tore away the decay and ruin.

NASCAR Cup Series cars participated in a tire test at North Wilkesboro in March.

Fans attending the NASCAR All-Star Race will see North Wilkesboro much as it was in its glory days, with identification of NASCAR sponsor and savior Winston dotting the grounds and ghosts of the late Junior Johnson—almost a cult figure locally—lurking outside the turns.

“We looked at it as a home track, but Junior lived there,” said Richard Childress, who both drove at NWS and delivered cars there that won for Dale Earnhardt. “If you beat Junior Johnson’s car there, you had done…