The track opened in 1993 as Southern National Speedway, set in the flat farmland of Wilson County south of Lucama. NASCAR's Southeast Series ran four races here between 1996 and 2002. The NASCAR Whelen Southern Modified Tour came seven times between 2006 and 2014. The CARS X-1R Pro Cup Series ran fifteen events over seventeen years. Drivers who would later make their names in the NASCAR national series — Mario Gosselin, Bobby Gill, Mark McFarland, Caleb Holman — passed through these turns. The track also handled an American Speed Association National Tour race in 1998, the kind of one-off that a small Carolina short track does not normally get a chance at.

By 2009, the track was essentially dormant. The PASS South Super Late Model Series held one points race on September 26 of that year. A USARacing Pro Cup event scheduled for August was canceled and moved to Langley Speedway in Virginia. The doors stayed mostly closed for two more years. When Michael Diaz bid $650,000 in October 2011, he was buying a property that had to prove itself viable again. The 2012 schedule was the first real test. The track survived it, then thrived. By 2023 it celebrated its 30th anniversary, and the name on the gate — Southern National Motorsports Park — has stuck for over a decade now.

Between 2015 and the present, the CARS Super Late Model Tour ran six races at Southern National. Six different winners, including Christopher Bell, Quin Houff, Raphaël Lessard, and Bubba Pollard — three of whom would compete at NASCAR's top level. The CARS Late Model Stock Tour added six more races, five winners, including Todd Gilliland, Deac McCaskill, Josh Berry, and Taylor Gray. The track also signed onto iRacing.com's roster in December 2015, meaning sim racers in basements worldwide can now grip the same paper-thin margins their professional counterparts work for real. In 2021, an ARCA Menards Series East race made its first and only appearance. The track lost the ARCA date the next year but added Carolina Pro Late Model and SMART Modified Tour events to fill the calendar.

The Thanksgiving Classic became Southern National's signature event. In 2022, the purse hit $50,000 to win — the richest payout in Late Model Stock history at the time. For a class of cars typically raced for purses measured in thousands, that figure represented something between a marketing statement and a thrown gauntlet. It worked. The race drew teams from across the Southeast. In 2025, Southern National partnered with Florence Motor Speedway to operate as outlaw, unsanctioned tracks, jointly creating an eight-race series called the Interstate 95 Showdown that culminates in November with the Charlie Powell Memorial in Florence and the Thanksgiving Classic in Lucama — the two tracks treating themselves as a pair, drawing the best short-track talent on the East Coast to a two-race championship that NASCAR has nothing to do with.