This article appears in the July 13th issue of ESPN The Magazine.
For four years, the people of Rockingham, N.C., refused to talk racing. For four years, they changed their routes home from work to avoid the feeling that came with driving by the old speedway, which sat rusting away on U.S. Highway 1, like so many of the abandoned textile mills that define the town limits. The greatest source of pride for Richmond County's 46,000 residents had fallen silent, no different from the weed-covered railroad lines that snaked through the once vibrant region.
For four decades, the gritty, one-mile oval -- originally named North Carolina Motor Speedway but affectionately known as the Rock -- helped build NASCAR, hosting 78 Cup Series events. Yarborough, Earnhardt and Gordon clinched championships here. But when stock car racing became a mainstream sport, the league moved on without the old country track, essentially leaving the Rock for the scrap heap after pulling up stakes in 2004.
For four years, the people of Rockingham lobbied for racing to come back home. And on Nov. 14, 2008, came the announcement they'd been waiting for. No, the Rock wasn't back on the Sprint Cup schedule, but this was the next best thing. To help teams cut costs and to level the playing field, NASCAR implemented a testing ban on league-sanctioned tracks. And that's when the race cars came rumbling home. Practically overnight, the big rigs from the big teams started streaming 70 miles down U.S. 74 from Charlotte. Crews hoping to fine-tune their cars beelined to the only local speedway available to them. Now, while tracks on NASCAR's schedule suffer through slow ticket sales and lagging sponsorships, the Rock is raking in about $5,000 per test session. And Rockingham is suddenly a motorsports boomtown.
Track owner Andy Hillenburg bought the Rock in the fall of 2007, saving it from the wrecking ball. Sitting in his office outside Turn 1, the 46-year-old former racer makes a sweeping motion with his hands to showcase the piles of Rockingham memorabilia
that locals had salvaged from the abandoned track and brought back after he moved in. Plaques, trophies and photos -- every artifact was delivered with a heartfelt story. Now those old yarns have been amended with new ones. Someone saw Kurt Busch buying gas on Fayetteville Road this morning. Someone else saw Carl Edwards landing his plane on the drag strip across the street, just like Rusty Wallace used to do on race days. And the haulers, well, there are so many rolling through town, people have quit keeping count.
After several years of painful silence, the roar of NASCAR has returned to Rockingham -- and so have the hopes of this tiny town that helped make the sports what it is today.
Every morning, Hillenburg has coffee and biscuits with local leaders at a Citgo just south of the track. The Indianapolis native didn't live here when the textile industry went overseas or when the railroad hub moved north to Richmond. But he's here now. And he sees the renewed hop in the town's step. "It may not seem like much, a bunch of 18-wheelers riding around town," says Hillenburg, dressed in his customary
golf shirt and cap with the Rock logo. "But for the people of Rockingham, it's like
welcoming back friends you haven't spoken to in years. It's a family reunion."
"When times were tough, the people still had pride in the racetrack," the late Benny Parsons said in 2004. Three decades earlier, the hometown hero had driven to an
unlikely NASCAR championship, clinching at the Rock in a locally sponsored car. But in the 1990s, track ownership changed hands several times, and the Rock became a bargaining chip in an antitrust suit, with shareholders of track conglomerate SMI claiming that NASCAR and ownership group ISC held a monopoly. In 2003, ISC moved the Rock's first Cup date to Southern California's Auto Club Speedway. A year later, new track owner and SMI honcho Bruton Smith slid the other race to his Texas Motor Speedway. "They sent everyone home," says Ann Street, who'd worked at the Rock for 18 years, doing everything from ticket sales to payroll. "They kept me to close out
financial things, and then that was it. One day we have 50,000 people here; the next day it was empty. It was so sad, people didn't want to drive by the place anymore."
The Rock withered for the next three years. One lone employee kept the grass cut as the bright red Winston Cup signs slowly faded into a cracked pink. Then Smith announced he was auctioning off the track, and on Oct. 2, 2007, nine bidders showed up, including scrap metal salesmen, land brokers and even reps from Richard Childress Racing. But the town's choice was made obvious by the cheering that erupted each time Hillenburg raised his paddle. "Andy contacted me after we learned that the track was up for sale," recalls Gene McLaurin, the mayor of Rockingham since 1997. "I didn't know a thing about him, so I called Keith Parsons, Benny's son, who worked in racing and lives in town. He said that Andy was one of his father's all-time favorite people. That's all I needed to hear."
Sitting at his desk now, Hillenburg rustles through a stack of papers and says, "I presented the mayor with this business plan: eight pages of handwritten notebook paper that looks like something I would have done in school. I guess they liked it." Hillenburg came up through the Midwestern sprint car wars, drove in each of NASCAR's top three series, won a title in ARCA, America's largest non-NASCAR stock car division, and even started the Indy 500 in 2000. After retiring in 2004, he devoted himself to running Fast Track Driving School, near Charlotte. With backing from the local bank, he bought the Rock for about $4.4 million. ARCA immediately signed on for a May 2008 race at what would now be rechristened Rockingham Speedway. "It took a month for the paperwork to clear," Hillenburg says. "They gave me the keys, and I sat down behind this desk and went, What do I do now?"
Within minutes, the phone rang. It was Street. She wanted her old job back. The next call was from fire chief David Knight, who asked to run track EMT operations again. Then Larry McNeil called, figuring he would be needed to run security again. Ellerbe Heating and Air, Hudson Paving, American Legion Post 49, Hayes Jewelers -- they'd all been crucial in 1965 and in 2004, and they wanted in. And whoever didn't call Hillenburg soon got a call from him.
As Street tells it, "When Andy started asking who used to do what, I opened the file drawer that had all that information in it four years earlier, and there it still was, right where I'd left it. No one had even touched it. I handed him the list and said, 'Let's start calling people.' "
Adds Robert Ingraham, director of operations for the track, "The first ARCA race was like putting on a glove for these folks; everybody just picked right up where they'd left off. It tells you what a void it created in their lives."
Last year, the Rock hosted one major racing event. This year it will host four, including the ASA Cherry Bomb 200, on July 4, and the ARCA season finale, on Oct. 11. On New Year's Day, as many as 99 cars will run the Polar Bear 150, most built and driven by Cup crew chiefs and mechanics. Says Hillenburg, "They kept telling me, 'Dude, you have to have a race we can come run during the off-season!' "
Rockingham's proximity to Charlotte makes it "the perfect solution" for Cup teams adjusting to the testing ban on NASCAR tracks.
But ARCA is still ARCA. The last gap in the Rock's comeback puzzle could be filled only by the stars and cars of NASCAR. The testing ban is a good first step. "I think I called Andy that very morning to start booking test dates," says Robbie Loomis, VP of race operations for Richard Petty Motorsports. "Rockingham is the perfect solution. It's a short drive from Charlotte, and with everything he's building, we can work on anything we need to."
Behind the track's backstretch, Hillenburg has built a half-mile clone of the Martinsville Speedway. It's called Little Rock. He plans to add a dirt track and a road course, too. "That's where 'Raceway Park' comes from," he says, unfurling a map of the future as if he were Walt Disney. "It's not just the big oval. It's a true multipurpose park." And a NASCAR testing paradise. Ingraham estimates that more than 150 days will be booked this year, a 10% increase over 2008. "If I could have Joey Logano there testing every day, I would," says the rookie's crew chief, Greg Zipadelli. "And every time we're up there, we're sharing the track with at least two or three other teams."
Every session brings Hillenburg closer to earning enough to make those eight sheets of notebook paper a reality. No one expects Cup racing to suddenly reappear, but officials with NASCAR's Nationwide and Trucks Series would relish a return. To make that happen, the Rock needs to add a SAFER "soft wall" barrier, a $1 million upgrade. Thanks to the testing ban, that seemingly impossible target now seems reachable.
As Keith Parsons contemplates it all, he sits in the shadow of the Rock's press box, newly renamed the Benny Parsons Tower. Keith manages the local bank now, and not a day goes by that someone doesn't ask him about his father, who passed away before the Rock was saved. And not a day goes by that he doesn't think about how happy his old man would have been. "If NASCAR does come racing, that would be one of the greatest comeback stories ever," Parsons says. "And during hard times, fans want to see something that reconnects them with racing's roots. But you know what? Even without a race, in so many ways, NASCAR is already back in Richmond County. It feels good. It feels right."
Ryan McGee is a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine.