A Brief History
On June 19, 1960, the first auto race under the NASCAR banner was run at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina. NASCAR is the premier stock-car racing circuit in the US and the world, as its official name, National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, implies.
Digging Deeper
While Europe was the venue of many prestigious stock-car races early in the 20th Century, the US took the lead on the sport with the emergence of Daytona Beach as a mecca for fast drivers. While originally using actual production model cars, hence the name of the sport, in 1966, the sport changed to using purpose-built race cars with an outward resemblance to “stock” cars.
NASCAR evolved from the hot rods used by bootleggers in order to outrun pursuing police vehicles, and has grown to become the sport with the highest average attendance in the US, although with only 36 annual events, it cannot match other sports with so many more events. Talladega Superspeedway can accommodate up to 190,000 spectators!
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Floryshak, Nathan. NASCAR: Trivia Quiz Book. Independently published, 2020.
Pearce, Al, et al. NASCAR 75 Years. Motorbooks, 2023.
The featured image in this article, a screenshot from NASA World Wind software of Charlotte Motor Speedway, is in the public domain because it is a screenshot from NASA’s globe software World Wind using a public domain layer, such as Blue Marble, MODIS, Landsat, SRTM, USGS or GLOBE.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
