The track first opened in 1966 as a quarter-mile dirt oval named Trico Speedway. Local short-track racing in the Carolina Piedmont was, in the 1960s, a self-contained world running its own divisions and its own celebrities - the same drivers and crews showing up Saturday after Saturday at Bowman Gray and Hickory and Asheville-Weaverville and Trico. The dirt configuration ran until 1973, including a single NASCAR Grand National East Series event that year, then the property went quiet for a decade. In 1983 a new ownership group bulldozed and paved the oval into its current 3/8-mile shape, banked 19 degrees in the turns and 16 on the straightaways. The banking is steeper than it looks on television, and the asphalt grips well enough that three distinct racing lines develop during a long feature. The slogan a new management team painted on the wall - the fastest 3/8-mile race track in America - was, then and probably still, marketing rather than fact, but the laps came down quickly enough that no one objected too loudly.

Between 1983 and 1994, the NASCAR Busch Grand National Series - now the Xfinity Series - held 27 races at Orange County Speedway. The track became one of the first venues in the area to host a live televised Busch race when the 1990 Roses Stores 200 went out over the air on June 9. Jeff Burton took his first pole in that race; Chuck Bown led 106 laps and won. The 1991 Texas Pete 300 became the last Busch race in which any driver lapped the entire field - Jimmy Hensley managed it from the front - and it carried the weight of a recent tragedy. The defending Busch series champion Jack Ingram had withdrawn from the race the week before, after his son was killed. He never raced again in the series. The final Busch race at Orange County, the 1994 Pantry Stores 300, ended in confusion when George Crenshaw blew his engine with two laps to go and slicked the track with oil. Hermie Sadler spun in it, recovered, and took the white flag at the same moment the caution came out. NASCAR awarded him the win.

By the early 2000s the track was in trouble. Short-track attendance had been falling across the country as televised national series pulled fans away from the local Saturday-night culture that had built NASCAR in the first place. Orange County Speedway shut down in 2003. The grandstands sat empty for almost three years. In March 2006, a new management team reopened the track, with volunteers donating time to repaint and resurface and clean up what neglect had begun to undo. The opening night drew the biggest crowd in years. The track now runs a weekly schedule on the second and fourth Saturday of each month from April through October, hosting the PASS Super Late Model series, the CARS Super Late Model Tour, and the CARS Late Model Stock Tour. On October 25, 2025, a driver named Zach Reaves ran a 16.325-second qualifying lap and set the track record for the pure stock division. It is exactly the kind of detail that local short-track racing has always been built on.

What makes Orange County Speedway worth remembering is not any single race but the cumulative list of drivers who have turned laps here. David Pearson and Glen Wood ran on the dirt before it became asphalt. Davey Allison and Donnie Allison ran here in the 1980s. Bubba Wallace, the first Black driver to win a NASCAR Cup race since Wendell Scott in 1963, came through on his way up. So did Ryan Blaney, who would later win the Cup championship in 2023. Jesse Little, Timothy Peters, and Gray Gaulding - drivers whose names fans of the national series may not recognize but who have built careers in the regional touring divisions - all log time at Orange County. The track is what NASCAR has always needed to feed its top tier and has always struggled to value: a small-budget oval where someone can be terrible one season, study film, and come back as a winner the next. It is still operating in 2026. Most of its peers from 1983 are not.