Before Daytona, there was Raleigh. In 1952, a paper-clip-shaped oval opened north of the city, banked sixteen degrees in the turns, lit overhead with floodlights so cars could race after dark. It was the second superspeedway in American motorsport — Darlington, opened in 1950, was the first — but it was the first to be paved, the first to host night-time NASCAR Grand National racing, the first to invite stock cars to do under lights what had only happened under sun. The cars came until 1958, when Fireball Roberts won the final Grand National on July 4. Then Daytona International Speedway opened in February 1959, the July 4 race moved south, and Raleigh Speedway closed that year amid complaints from neighbors who, reasonably enough, found themselves living next to a track that ran until midnight.
The track took its shape from geometry rather than spectacle. Front and back straights ran about 1,850 feet long, separated by roughly 500 feet, the corners sweeping tight at sixteen degrees of bank. That shape — long, narrow, almost stretched — is what veteran racers call a paper clip. The infield held a quarter-mile track where Modifieds and Sportsmen raced on Friday nights. The big oval hosted the Grand National series, which would later be renamed Winston Cup, then Nextel, then the names you know now. Troy Ruttman won the inaugural event on July 4, 1952, driving an Offy-powered Kuzma in a 200-mile AAA IndyCar race. The name was Southland Speedway then. By 1953 it had become Raleigh, and stayed Raleigh.
Tim Flock raced with a rhesus monkey named Jocko Flocko strapped into a custom co-driver harness, a publicity gimmick that had somehow worked through eight races. At Raleigh in 1953, Jocko slipped his harness while Tim was running in second place, chasing his brother Fonty. The monkey discovered a trap door in the floorboard — the one drivers used to check the right-front tire — and pulled the cord. A pebble flew up, struck him in the head, and Jocko went berserk inside a stock car traveling at racing speed. Tim pitted to have his crazed primate removed. He finished third. Jocko never raced again. The story is one of the strange, gentle absurdities that NASCAR's early years produced before the sport learned to take itself entirely seriously.
On the night of September 19, 1953, sixty cars rolled off in a combined Modified and Sportsman race. Bill Blevins' car would not start. A push truck got him going, then he stalled at the exit of turn two on the backstretch, perhaps expecting another push. The flag man missed him. Some in the crowd saw, shouted, and pointed, but the green flag waved and fifty-nine cars came out of turn two at full speed. The first impact set Blevins' Ford on fire. The track had two extinguishers. Flames shot more than seventy feet into the air. Bill Blevins and Jesse Midkiff died. Fifteen cars were destroyed. It took an hour and twenty minutes to clear the wreckage. Buddy Shuman won the shortened race. Two drivers were dead, and the night became known in racing circles as Black Saturday — a reckoning with what speed under lights, with too few safety crews, could cost.
When Daytona International Speedway opened in 1959, the gravitational center of stock car racing shifted south. Raleigh Speedway closed that same year. Neighbors who had endured nighttime engine roar and racing dust got their evenings back. The track sat idle through the 1960s and was demolished in 1967. Most of the site today is the Seaboard Industrial Park, with CSX rail siding running where the front straight used to be. But about ninety feet of the backstretch still survives, hidden in the woods southwest of the Progress Energy substation on Tarheel Drive. Walk in carefully and you can still find the asphalt — a fragment of the surface where Lee Petty, Buck Baker, and Fonty Flock once raced under lights that Raleigh has long since taken down.
Located at 35.83N, 78.61W just north of downtown Raleigh, near Capital Boulevard and the modern industrial park area. The site is now largely the Seaboard Industrial Park; the surviving backstretch fragment is in woods southwest of the Progress Energy substation on Tarheel Drive. Nearest airport is Raleigh-Durham International (KRDU), 14 miles west. Look for the rail line and industrial parcels north of the I-440 beltline.