Qualla: Martinsville Speedway

Martinsville Speedway: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Henry Clay Earles called the dust unbelievable. On September 7, 1947, the day he opened his new race track on thirty acres of Virginia red clay, the modified stock cars churned the surface into a brown fog so dense that after the race, in his words from a 1967 interview, you couldn't recognize the people leaving. He compared the cloud to the aftermath of an H-bomb. The crowd of 6,013 went home filthy. The race had been won, in the dust and confusion, by a former Air Force tail gunner named Red Byron, the man who had won the war's wreckage and would shortly win NASCAR's first championship as well. Earles had budgeted ten thousand dollars for his three partners. He had spent twice that. Almost no one in 1947 would have predicted that this tiny, half-mile dirt track in Ridgeway, Virginia, would still be on the NASCAR schedule almost eighty years later - still hosting two Cup Series weekends a year, still the shortest oval in the series, still producing the most physical racing on the calendar.

Read more: Martinsville Speedway on Qualla

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Martinsville Speedway: The Paperclip

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zach Catanzareti Photo, CC BY-SA 2.0. Look at Martinsville Speedway from directly above and the shape is instantly recognizable: a paperclip. Two long, perfectly flat straightaways connected by tight 180-degree turns. The corners are banked twelve degrees - shallow by NASCAR standards. The straights have no banking a...

Read more: Martinsville Speedway on Qualla

Image: Zach Catanzareti Photo | CC BY-SA 2.0

Martinsville Speedway: From Dirt to NASCAR

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Earles paved the track in 1955. By then the inaugural NASCAR Cup race had already run here in September 1949, Red Byron winning again, and Bill France Sr. had bought out Earles's partners Sam Rice and Henry Lawrence the year before to lock in the relationship. Through the 1960s t...

Read more: Martinsville Speedway on Qualla

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Martinsville Speedway: Mass Expansion and Modern Tragedy

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nascar1996, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 1990s rebuilt the speedway almost from scratch. Every year for five consecutive years - 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 - the track added a new tower, totaling more than 14,000 new seats. In 1996 the 7,000-seat Bill France Sr. Tower went up over turns three and four. A second to...

Read more: Martinsville Speedway on Qualla

Image: Nascar1996 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Martinsville Speedway: The Hot Dogs and the Grandfather Clock

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt and Cyndi Maxson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two things at Martinsville matter beyond the racing. The first is the trophy. Cup Series winners at Martinsville receive a six-foot grandfather clock - an actual functional pendulum clock, presented in victory lane, an oddity older than most of the drivers who win it. Drivers dis...

Read more: Martinsville Speedway on Qualla

Image: Matt and Cyndi Maxson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Martinsville Speedway: Owned by NASCAR, Beloved by Drivers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit scbailey, CC BY 2.0. In May 2004 the France-family-owned International Speedway Corporation announced their $192 million purchase of Martinsville from Earles's family and the remaining minority partners. Earles himself had died in 1999; his grandson Clay Campbell continued running the track, and cont...

Read more: Martinsville Speedway on Qualla

Image: scbailey | CC BY 2.0