Carowinds announced the ride in February 1976 and rushed it to opening in April. Bobby Allison and David Pearson, two of the most famous NASCAR drivers of the era, were at the park for the grand opening on April 3. Newspapers from across the country sent reporters. Two moonshine stills sat at the entrance, painted in red, white, and blue. The 1958 Robert Mitchum film Thunder Road - the moonshine-running drama that had launched a thousand stock car careers and given the Charlotte motor sport scene its mythology - lent the coaster both its name and its theming. The first trains came from a different defunct ride: Chicago's Riverview Park, which had closed in 1967, had a coaster called Jetstream whose trains were repurposed and repainted as a sheriff's car and an outlaw's car for the two racing tracks.

Thunder Road was a double-track racing coaster - two trains, two mirrored tracks running parallel through almost the entire 3,800-foot circuit. As both trains left the station, they made gentle opposing turns under the brake run, then climbed the chain lift side by side. The 88-foot first drop sent them racing across a sequence of medium air-time hills before the tracks diverged in the turnaround section farthest from the station. Each train circled back independently across more bunny hops, ducked into a covered tunnel, and converged at the brake run. For the 20th anniversary in 1995, Carowinds reversed one of the trains so it ran backwards while the other ran forward - a configuration that lasted until 2008, when both sides went forward again.

Wooden coasters demand constant maintenance. The original Riverview trains were retired in 1980 after they damaged the tracks; Philadelphia Toboggan Coasters built replacement trains with lower capacity and gentler wheel profiles. Tracks were retracked in sections through the 1990s and 2000s. On April 5, 1999, two trains collided at a section of track between operating cycles, injuring seven people. Sensors were replaced and the ride reopened. By the 2010s, the structure was aging, the queue lines were shorter than they had been in the 1980s, and Cedar Fair's expansion plans had begun to look hungrily at the acreage Thunder Road occupied. The decision was made for Fury 325.

On May 23, 2015, Carowinds announced Thunder Road would close permanently. The final operating day was July 26, 2015. The park ran a farewell celebration with the hashtag ThanksThunderRoad. The first hundred riders received commemorative posters and buttons. Fans submitted video tributes. A drawing distributed pieces of the ride to lucky entrants, including the right to ride the very last train. By August, demolition was underway. Cedar Fair did not waste the wood: salvaged components were shipped north to The Racer at Kings Island in Ohio and Racer 75 at Kings Dominion in Virginia, where they were used to refurbish those parks' own racing coasters. Thunder Road's bones still ride.

Carowinds remembers. Tucked into the Blue Ridge Junction area that replaced the ride, the Blue Ridge Country Kitchen restaurant displays a poster that reads Thunder Road Dragway - a list of fictional sponsors that includes nods to the original ride. The station of Copperhead Strike, the launched coaster that opened next door in 2019, contains a Centurion Motor Oil mural that pays tribute to both Thunder Road and White Lightnin', another former Carowinds wooden coaster. Thunder Striker, the 232-foot hyper coaster that opened in 2010 as Intimidator and was renamed in 2024, references Thunder Road in its name. Forty-nine years after opening day, the moonshine theme still runs through the park. The trains just don't race anymore.