WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — Ryan Blaney was a little kid the first time he raced at Bowman Gray Stadium — he figures he couldn't have been older than 10 — and remembers it being the coolest thing he'd ever done in motorsports.
He was in a Bandolero, an entry-level car designed for young drivers, racing in front of 17,000 fans that comprised the largest crowd he'd ever seen as an athlete. The intensity was off the charts, on the track and in the crowd.
“I was getting shot the bird by kids younger than me when I was 10,” Blaney said Saturday. “So it was like, ‘OK, that’s what this place is about, people like you or they don't.' And I don't even think they didn't like me. I'm 10 years old. What's not to like about a 10 year old? So that was pretty funny to me."
That's the expectation for the intensity level Saturday and Sunday night, when NASCAR returns to its roots to race the exhibition preseason Clash at a venue it last brought its Cup cars to in 1971. As NASCAR moved on to bigger and more modern markets and facilities, Bowman Gray remained stuck in time. It is home to Winston-Salem State University’s football team, and serves as a quarter-mile track for weekly local racing.
The track is so small NASCAR recently made a video highlighting what can and can't fit inside Bowman Gray. Among things that could possibly be squeezed in? A Buc-ee's convenience store and a Bass Pro Shops store were ruled “barely," while the Team Penske race shop, at over 300,000-square-feet, was a definite no.
The tight confines mean accidents are often — Saturday afternoon's modified race didn't even make it one lap without its first wreck — and tempers flare at the track called the “Mecca of Madhouse” for the fireworks produced by the action.
Kyle Busch, one of NASCAR's more volatile drivers, joked the field met with NASCAR earlier Saturday and “they already gave us the list of who's supposed to fight with who.”
It's sort of what's expected at a notorious rough-and-tumble track where car owner Richard Childress sold peanuts in the grandstands as a child and Eddie Wood sat in the same seats every Saturday night eating french fries with vinegar as his father, Wood Brothers Racing founder Glenn Wood, won 29 races across all divisions.
Tim Brown, a 53-year-old mechanic for Rick Ware Racing, is the winningest driver in Bowman Gray history with 101 victories and 12 championships and maybe wasn't joking when he said fighting was a requirement to race at the track.
Brown landed a seat for this event with RWR for his Cup Series debut in what he called a dream come true for a journeyman local racer. And in 30 years racing at Bowman Gray, he figured he'd been 10 fights.
“That’s pretty good, right? They were good ones,” he said.
How many did he win?
“All of them," replied Brown.
But what brings that intensity to Winston-Salem, where the stadium was built in 1937 for $2.2 million as a public works project to provide jobs during the Great Depression?
“Just the passion. I’m very passionate about what I do on and off the racetrack, and we take a lot of pride in our equipment and our race cars are immaculate," Brown said. "We don’t make a lot of money to do this at this level, so if you tear my race car up, I’m gonna come and see you.”
The first event at Bowman Gray was a football game in 1938 between Wake Forest and Duke, and the first motorsports race was a midget car race in 1939 when the track was a dirt oval. The first NASCAR-sanctioned race was in 1949.
The race doesn't count for points and is the lead-up to the Feb. 16 Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway, which hosted the Clash from 1979 to 2021. It was moved to Los Angeles Memorial Stadium on a temporary track NASCAR constructed inside the last three seasons, but was moved to North Carolina in an attempt to return to the grassroots of stock car racing.
It counts for nothing but pride, and yet every driver in the field wants to win.
“You want to win at neat places, historical places like this,” Blaney said. “Those guys who won at the Coliseum, that’s a really historic place. You can say that I won at the Coliseum in L.A. and here it’s the same way. I think to be able to have that title would be pretty cool.”
For Busch, he appreciated the opportunity of a NASCAR race at a small local venue and the benefits that Bowman Gray can reap from the exposure. As discussion swirls about where the event should be held in the future, Busch wants to uplift small short tracks.
“Us going somewhere to reinvest in the future for other racing and local level racers — to be able to see a better venue, to go and enjoy and bring their sponsors and have fun and race and compete — is only going to benefit from the top,” Busch said. “There are short tracks in Florida that are cool. Pensacola is one of them that would really benefit from this opportunity. There’s a couple in Alabama that would really benefit from this opportunity.”
“Return on investment? I don’t know, but I think the return on investment is the younger generations and the younger racers that want to be somebody and get to race at a cool place, and then can move up the ladder and someday, one day go back and race at their home track as a pro,” he added.
The Clash begins Saturday night with the 39 cars split into groups for short practice sessions, followed by four heat races that will determine Sunday night's starting lineup. From 1959 to 1971, all Cup winners came from the first two rows for 26 consecutive races.
Sunday night's main event will be 200 laps with a halftime break at 100 laps, and only green-flag laps count.
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http://accesswdun.com/article/2025/2/1284210