Raleigh's First Speedway

Into NASCAR's home base state we enter, with our first stop being one of the major attractions of the autumn season in North Carolina: the State Fairgrounds.

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peep the J.S. Dorton Arena in the back

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Overview and History

Settled in the western part of Raleigh by the Carter-Finley Stadium and the Lenovo Center, the North Carolina State Fairgrounds is the home of the North Carolina State Fair. An agricultural exposition held since 1853, the fair began as a collection and congregation of North Carolina’s farmers, politicians, military, and influential people that eventually moved to larger sites throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. By the turn of the 20th century, the fair regularly attracted a visitor count in the tens of thousands, and after some shaky financial windfalls that required the State to take control of the Fair’s operation from the NC State Agricultural Society, the expo moved to its current location, albeit with a smaller 200 acre plot of land compared to its current 344 acreage of space that it encompasses today. The Fair now receives a visitor count in the million person range, and remains a staple of autumn activities in Raleigh.

you wouldn't even know on first glance that a racetrack was ever here

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Among the many booths and experiences available at the Fairgrounds was one large hole of earth at its center: the State Fair Speedway. Opened in 1928 alongside the new and improved Fair activities, the speedway started out like most dirt tracks from this time: as a horse racing track. It hosted its first race that year and attracted fans from all over the Carolinas until the US had to get involved in WW2. Once the war ended, the fans and drivers came back in 1946, and hosted its first NASCAR Grand national race in 1955. Unfortunately, the fans that flocked to the track that Memorial Day Saturday didn’t get the fully-billed distance experience, as rain shortened the race and gave Junior Johnson the victory with 28 laps to go. 

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It’d take another 14 years for the big boys to return, but in 1969 they did to the tune of the Silver Fox taking victory in a race that DID go the full 100 mile distance. By this time, the Fairgrounds had become one of only 3 dirt tracks on the entire Cup schedule, a list inundated with races to this point approaching 50 by 1970. So on a Wednesday afternoon at the end of September that year, a NASCAR Grand National race was started and completed; and like most dirt races run in this era of NASCAR, Richard Petty took top honors ending up in victory lane. This wasn’t just any other race, though; this one has the distinction of being the final dirt race in the NASCAR Cup Series for more than 50 years. Not until the Bristol Dirt Race experiment in 2021 would the top flight of stock car racing in America return to the dirt. And with that, a founding piece of stock car went by the wayside for about half a century. So too did the speedway from the new Winston Cup calendar, and from the Fairgrounds itself.

I don't think the King imagined this particular feat would last for decades

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Did You Know?

- The nearby Carter-Finley Stadium is the home of NC State’s football team, the Wolfpack; the Lenovo Center further up the road is the home rink of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes.

- The original grandstands are still in use today, known as the Sam G. Rand Grandstand that’s used for concerts, monster truck races, figure 8 events, and more.

- Now that it’s been hammered into your head that the King won the final race on dirt for awhile, do you know who finished 2nd to him? The answer: the late Neil Castles, who scored his 50th career Cup Series top 5 finish by placing 2nd in his 1969 Dodge 5 laps behind Richard, the final of his 4 penultimate place finishes and the penultimate top 5 finish of his Cup career.

never won a race, but he got damn close a few times

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Life After Racing

If you manage to visit the NC State Fair at any point, you may be able to see the outline of the track standing from the Rand Grandstand. Granted, it’s been so long since then that any visual markers are sure to have been developed away, but the area remains a part of racing history in more ways than one. Along with the final race of that 1970 season, the speedway helped wind down one of the founding eras of American auto racing, just missing out on the window of modernity to serve North Carolina in a different manner for the rest of time. Goodness only knows what would happen if Richard Petty’s wish for dirt tracks to remain in NASCAR was granted, we may not have seen the last of the State Fairgrounds if so.

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at least the grandstand remains to serve as a marker alongside the H-120 historical one

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On the next episode of 2025 Daytona 500 Countdown...

The Fairgrounds is not the only track in Raleigh that's been more or less lost to time...