NASCAR’s return to North Wilkesboro Speedway was cool, but it cost $18 million in public money that didn’t need to be spent.
NASCAR’s return to North Wilkesboro Speedway was cool, but it cost $18 million in public money that didn’t need to be spent.
T he early days of NASCAR were largely spent in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. One of the famous early tracks is North Wilkesboro Speedway, in a rural area of western North Carolina. Legends of the sport such as Richard Petty, Fireball Roberts, Junior Johnson, and David Pearson have all won there.
As NASCAR grew in popularity, the sport expanded across the country and into larger media markets. Some rural tracks such as North Wilkesboro — lacking access to interstate highways, larger seating capacity, and modern amenities fans now expect at sporting events — were booted from the schedule. NASCAR held its last points-paying race at North Wilkesboro in 1996, and the track sat mostly vacant for years afterwards.
Yesterday’s Cup Series all-star race marked NASCAR’s triumphant return to North Wilkesboro. The all-star race didn’t award points towards the season championship; it was an exhibition race with a smaller field, and the winner gets $1 million, which Kyle Larson claimed in dominant fashion, passing every car in the field to recover from an early race pit-road penalty and win running away.
The race, watched by a sellout crowd, was well-received by current and former drivers. Darrell Waltrip, a ten-time North Wilkesboro winner, was back in the commentary booth. “This property feels more like a week long festival than just a race,” tweeted Dale Earnhardt Jr., who’d helped in efforts to revitalize the track.
Also at the track was North Carolina governor Roy Cooper. Stock-car racing is part of North Carolina’s history, and the governor’s presence at the race wasn’t necessarily surprising. But he was there as more than just a race fan.
North Carolina used $18 million from the American Rescue Plan Act to help fund the revitalization of North Wilkesboro Speedway. Cooper made it a priority to send federal money that President Biden said was for “rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation — working people and middle-class folks, the people who built the country — a fighting chance” to racetracks. But nothing happens in the North Carolina budget without the Republican majority in the general assembly approving it — and state house speaker Tim Moore and state senate president pro tempore Phil Berger supported the funding as well.
It’s true that $18 million isn’t a lot of money for the state government. But it’s also not a lot of money for the motorsports industry. Before the government money came in, Earnhardt Jr. had led an effort to clean up North Wilkesboro enough to scan the track into iRacing, a popular racing-simulator video game. In theory, Earnhardt Jr., who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, could have put together a group of investors to revitalize the track on his own. Track owner Speedway Motorsports, which also owns ten other tracks and makes hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue, could also have footed the bill to spruce up North Wilkesboro if it wanted.
Private investment wasn’t forthcoming, likely because NASCAR has been unwilling to commit to regular racing at North Wilkesboro in the future. Even after the successful all-star race yesterday, it remains unlikely that a points-paying race will return to the track; though it has been made raceable again, the facility is still tiny compared to modern tracks, with little room for growth, and the racing surface hasn’t been repaved since 1981.
If NASCAR returns to North Wilkesboro in the future, it will most likely be for an exhibition “throwback” event. NASCAR’s schedule of exhibition races has been notoriously chaotic in recent years, with the preseason Clash race having moved from the Daytona International Speedway oval to Daytona’s infield road course to the Los Angeles Coliseum, and sponsorship changing from Anheuser-Busch to Sprint to Advance Auto Parts and now back to Anheuser-Busch. Since 2019, the all-star race has moved from Charlotte Motor Speedway to Bristol Motor Speedway to Texas Motor Speedway and then to North Wilkesboro for this year. There has been no word yet on where it will be held next year. So it’s easy to see why private investors might hesitate to sink cash into North Wilkesboro.
The government doesn’t have to think about returns when it’s spending other people’s money. Cooper celebrated the spending using the debunked logic of stadium subsidies, saying that it will boost North Carolina’s economy. At best, even when they aren’t boondoggles, stadium subsidies largely redirect spending that would have gone elsewhere rather than creating new economic activity. A 2022 review of over 130 stadium-subsidy studies over 30 years confirmed that subsidies provide little to no economic benefit to the cities they are targeted towards. And of course, the only way to give this “investment” to the racetracks was to take it from taxpayers in the first place.
For years, people in and around NASCAR have thought it would be cool to race again at North Wilkesboro, but they haven’t been willing to put up too much of their own money to do it. Then, Biden signed into law a blowout spending bill that contributed to the first bout of higher inflation in 40 years while sending billions to state governments that were already flush with revenue, and North Carolina politicians siphoned off some of that money for North Wilkesboro. Supposedly for helping the economy recover after the pandemic, the money was spent on a track that had been vacant since 1996.
Last night’s race was cool, but it shouldn’t have been supported by public money.