We’re closing in on the ultimate handful of weeks of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Collection season, the inventory automobile collection’ seventy fifth anniversary marketing campaign. To have fun, every week by the tip of the season, Ryan McGee is presenting his prime 5 favourite issues in regards to the sport.
Prime 5 best-looking vehicles? Examine. Prime 5 hardest drivers? We have it. Prime 5 mustaches? There may be just one, so possibly not.
With out additional ado, our 75 favourite issues about NASCAR, celebrating 75 years of inventory automobile racing.
Earlier installments: Hardest drivers | Biggest races | Greatest title fights | Greatest-looking vehicles | Worst-looking vehicles | Greatest cheaters | Greatest what-ifs | Weirdest racetracks
5 finest racetracks
As we proceed to roll by our NASCAR seventy fifth anniversary celebration through our weekly top-five all-time best lists, we additionally combat to correctly roll by the very best racing line, searching for to attain the right steadiness between loopy and superior. Like Cale Yarborough qualifying at Daytona in 1983, one lap you may be operating 200-plus mph and the following you possibly can completely lose the deal with and wind up airborne and the other way up.
One week in the past, we revealed our prime 5 weirdest racetracks. So, it solely is smart to counter that goofiness with greatness. So, seize a helmet, strap these belts tight and comply with the tempo automobile out onto the asphalt (though, please not as shut as Dale Earnhardt messing with Elmo Langley again within the day) as we current our prime 5 all-time best NASCAR racetracks.
Honorable point out: Charlotte Speedway
No, not the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Not even the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval or the Charlotte Fairgrounds Speedway. Nope, simply plain ol’ Charlotte Speedway, the three-quarter-mile red-clay oval situated simply southwest of sleepy downtown Charlotte.
Editor’s Picks
2 Associated
It was soiled, uneven, as dry on one finish because it was a mud lavatory on the opposite. It hosted a dozen Cup Collection (then Strictly Inventory) occasions from 1949 to 1956 and topped eight winners, 4 of whom are already within the NASCAR Corridor of Fame and two extra who needs to be (ahem, Fonty Flock and Speedy Thompson).
The rationale it makes this record, although, is as a result of it hosted the primary race of what has change into the Cup Collection and it was the peerlessly imperfect place to take action. The observe is lengthy gone, however you possibly can nonetheless discover a historic marker on the website, situated between razor wire-wrapped trucking depots and parking tons simply north of Charlotte Douglas Worldwide Airport.
5. Talladega Superspeedway
This place has by no means made any sense. It is too large. It is too quick. It was constructed atop each an deserted navy airbase and Native American holy floor.
The two.66-mile monster (which is only a bizarre measurement, by the best way) with the 33-degree turns that measure 26 toes in peak has ignited numerous “Massive One” crashes and much more large controversies. The place was so intimidating that, when it opened in 1969, the superstars of the game staged a walkout, leaving the inaugural race to be run by journeyman racers known as up from decrease divisions by a defiant Massive Invoice France.
Within the 54 years since, although, it has produced so many ridiculous finishes (see: Dale Sr. passing 18 vehicles in 4 laps to win in 2000) and ridiculous moments (see: Dale Earnhardt Jr. profitable 4 in a row) and ridiculous information (Invoice Elliott’s 212.808 mph lap in 1987 remains to be a NASCAR mark) that may’t be outrun even by an equally lengthy parade of bizarre and unhealthy Talladega tales. Talking of these Talladega curses, here is an inventory I compiled 15 years in the past.
4. Martinsville Speedway
The one observe to be included on the OG NASCAR Strictly Inventory schedule alongside Charlotte Speedway in 1949 and has by no means left that calendar since (sorry, North Wilkesboro). This mega-flat, half-mile paper clip tucked into the hills of southern Virginia nonetheless very a lot feels and even smells prefer it did again when Crimson Byron received the primary of the 149(!) NASCAR premier collection races this fabled bullring has hosted, starting 74 years in the past subsequent week.
Positive, it has been paved since then, however like that day in September 1949, the practice nonetheless creeps its means alongside the backstretch so the conductor can verify who’s profitable, the place remains to be whole hell on brakes, and people well-known Martinsville scorching canines are nonetheless simply pretty much as good, and nonetheless simply as pink. I wrote this love letter to all of the above again in 2008.
3. Charlotte Motor Speedway
In 1960, when Curtis Turner and Bruton Smith bankrupted themselves constructing a mile-and-a-half oval in the midst of nowhere north of Charlotte (Turner even managed to earn himself a lifetime ban), they have been considered by many as silly and reckless. If truth be told, they have been a pair of motorsports visionaries. NASCAR was shifting into its so-called Speedway Period, starting its lengthy shift away from a short-track-packed near-nightly schedule searching for weekend venues that have been actually, figuratively and financially larger.
That day in 1960, the uncured asphalt got here up in chunks to the purpose that racers needed to wrap their rides in hen wire to guard their radiators from tumbling blacktop projectiles.
Patiently ready. 🔜 #BofAROVAL pic.twitter.com/fCjpI8EZgy
— Charlotte Motor Speedway (@CLTMotorSpdwy) September 14, 2023
Ever since, Charlotte Motor Speedway has been a future manufacturing unit, from former speedway president Humpy Wheeler discovering funding to get a really younger Earnhardt and a really resisted Janet Guthrie onto his racetrack to improvements resembling the primary speedway lighting grid, the Speedway Membership, the Flip 1 condos, the NASCAR All-Star Race and, sure, the Roval. Its double-dogleg D-shaped intermediate format additionally grew to become the mannequin for a complete era of racetracks, for higher or worse.
CMS by no means sits nonetheless. By no means has. By no means will.
2. Darlington Raceway
How superior is that this place? It does not have merely one cool nickname however two! “The Woman in Black” and “The Observe Too Powerful To Tame.”
Darlington was “Discipline of Desires” lengthy earlier than “Shoeless” Joe Jackson wandered in out of the corn, the dream of entrepreneur Harold Brasington, who visited Indianapolis Motor Speedway and left so impressed that he determined to construct a giant ol’ racetrack in … the sandhills of South Carolina? Brasington plowed below his peanut crops amid whispers from locals that he had misplaced his thoughts and ended up with a sufficiently quirky 1.366-mile oval that was egg-shaped as a result of he had needed to work round a minnow pond a neighboring farmer refused to promote.
And this is the reason Darlington Raceway is the very best. Have a look at these earlier than/after images posted by NASCAR from final evening. pic.twitter.com/Te6kkVRHVU
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) September 4, 2023
It was inventory automobile racing’s first asphalt speedway, and though the format has been barely altered over time, to most fashionable racers with any sense of inventory automobile racing historical past, Darlington is the place and the Southern 500 is the race the place they will actually see and really feel how they may have measured up in opposition to NASCAR’s moonshine-soaked pioneers who took Darlington’s first inexperienced flag on Labor Day weekend 1950.
1. Daytona Worldwide Speedway
Sure, this can be a very old-school record. And sure, if it weren’t for touchstone racetracks like Darlington and Martinsville, then the World Middle of Racing would by no means have been born in 1959. Of all of the top-five lists now we have compiled to this point, although, this might need been the simplest No. 1 rating to determine.
That is as a result of in each nook of this planet, should you say the phrase “Daytona,” chances are high somebody within the room, it doesn’t matter what language they communicate, goes to know the identify. And talking of top-five lists, should you requested any longtime NASCAR fan or competitor to compile their roll name of best moments in inventory automobile historical past, there’s zero doubt that it will embody at the least one Daytona second — and extra seemingly a number of ones.
Lee Petty’s photograph end in 1959. David Pearson vs. Richard Petty in 1976. “The King” and “There is a combat!” in 1979. Petty’s two hundredth win in 1984. Darrell Waltrip lastly profitable the five hundred in 1989 with a “Thank God!” Earnhardt lastly profitable it in 1998 and the world’s longest high-five line. Dale Jr.’s emotional July win in 2001. Kevin Harvick vs. Mark Martin. All the wild checkers-or-wreckers finishes of latest years.
It is so simple as this. NASCAR visits so many superb racetracks yearly, and has visited so many numerous extra over all these many years, however there is just one axis upon which all the NASCAR world revolves, and it is that large, stunning 2.5-mile oval on the Florida coast.
Then once more, possibly it wasn’t such a straightforward choice. After we threw it out to the interwebs, the race between Darlington and Daytona was nearer than Ricky Craven edging Kurt Busch …