On May 18, 1952, a crowd of 4,500 packed dirt grandstands outside Newton, North Carolina, to watch Gwyn Staley win the first race at Charlie Combs' new Hickory Speedway. Two months later, lights went in for night racing and Staley won the first one of those too. The next season, NASCAR's Grand National series - the top one, the series that would become the Cup - showed up. Tim Flock won the inaugural Cup-level race here on May 16, 1953. For the next eighteen years, the biggest names in stock-car racing came through this short Catawba Valley track. Then NASCAR's rules changed, the long-distance races consolidated at superspeedways, and Hickory was left to run its own kind of racing on its own kind of night.
Ownership changed hands a dozen times through the 1950s and 1960s. Charlie Combs sold to Grafton Burgess in 1959. Burgess sold to Charlotte developers Bill Edwards and Ed Griffin in 1967 for about $144,000. The new owners paved the track in August 1967 - the dirt era ended overnight - and then hired racing driver Ned Jarrett as general manager. Jarrett, who would later become one of NASCAR's first truly polished broadcast voices, ran Hickory Speedway for nearly a decade. The track was remeasured in 1970 to 0.363 miles, its current length. NASCAR's last top-tier race here ran in 1971; the following year the series stopped scheduling anything under 250 miles, and Hickory's Cup era was over.
Hickory's nickname is 'the Track Too Tough to Tame,' but its other nickname - 'the Birthplace of the NASCAR Stars' - is closer to the historical record. Drivers learned their craft here on Saturday nights. Ned Jarrett raced and managed here. Bobby Isaac, who took the 1970 Cup championship, collapsed from heat exhaustion at the wheel during a Late Model race on August 13, 1977, and died of a heart attack in the early hours of August 14. Pre-production race footage for the 1973 movie The Last American Hero - Junior Johnson's story - was shot here, though the film's main production was based out of Charlotte. The Busch Series ran here for 17 seasons. When NASCAR's second-tier division pulled out after the 1998 season because purses had grown beyond what Hickory could pay, the track shifted to grassroots racing and never really looked back.
Car dealer Benny Yount bought the track in December 1986 for about a million dollars. His first move was a $100,000 renovation - press boxes, fan amenities, concrete walls in place of guardrails. He has been the constant since. The track was renamed Hickory Motor Speedway in November 1988. The asphalt has been completely repaved twice - in 1991 and again in 1992, the second time because the first repaving came apart during a Busch Series race. Sherry Clifton ran the place as promoter for years; tire distributor Kevin Piercy took over in 2008. In 2023, the state of North Carolina awarded the track $568,264 in COVID-19 relief funds, which paid to renovate the bathrooms and pave the pit area infield. A short track adapts. It survives by changing slowly.
Hickory Motor Speedway runs a NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series season every year, plus dates on the CARS Tour and the SMART Modified Tour. The ARCA Menards Series East added a 150-lap race in 2026. The seating capacity, depending on which newspaper you trust, is somewhere between 5,000 and 9,600. The banking is 14 degrees in turns one and two, 12 degrees in three and four, 8 degrees on the straights. On a Saturday night in May with the lights on, the cars roar past at speeds that look impossibly fast for a track this short. It is one of the older operating short tracks in the country, and it is still doing what Charlie Combs built it to do in 1952.
Hickory Motor Speedway is at 35.696 N, 81.269 W, in Newton, North Carolina (NOT in Hickory itself), about 4 miles south of downtown Hickory along U.S. Route 70. Field elevation around 1,100 feet. The asphalt oval is small and easy to miss from altitude - look for the long axis of the track running roughly east-west alongside U.S. 70. Nearest airports: Hickory Regional (KHKY) 5 miles north, Statesville Regional (KSVH) 28 miles east. Interstate 40 passes just north of the track.