Checkered History (Preview)

The Speedway in 2009

There’s a spot just beyond the Atlanta Motor Speedway where an old church cemetery slumbers in a grassy field, its tombstones a somber counterpoint to the brightly colored sponsor billboards lining the outside of the track. Anyone who has ever attended a race at the speedway and heard the caterwauling chorus of juiced-up Fords and Chevys must wonder: How can anything rest in peace through such a barrage?

The awesome roar of stock car racing came to the southside fifty years ago when the Atlanta International Raceway, as it was known, opened in the Henry County town of Hampton. It was 1960. The sit-in movement was spreading through the South, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were squaring off for the presidency, and the Braves were still the toast of Milwaukee. Metro Atlanta had recently passed 1 million in population and was looking to make a big-league splash in sports. Stock car racing, with its roots in the moonshine running of North Georgia and North Carolina, was a natural.

There had been other automobile racetracks in the area. Coca-Cola magnate Asa G. Candler built the first one in 1909 near land that became the Atlanta airport. Starting in 1917, the city’s top racing venue was a mile-long dirt oval at the Lakewood Park fairgrounds. Drivers in the 1950s also competed at the Peach Bowl, a quarter-mile track on Howell Mill Road in what’s now the Westside area. With a seating capacity of 124,000, the Atlanta Motor Speedway of today laps them all. The Labor Day weekend race last year drew a near-capacity crowd, making Hampton, at least for a few hours, the fifth-largest city in the state.

Over the years, the speedway has been a stage for performers as diverse as Dale Earnhardt and Janis Joplin. It has seen triumph and tragedy, prosperity and bankruptcy, skinny-dipping hippies and mud-wrestling mamas. As the track celebrates its golden anniversary, we asked some drivers, fans, sportswriters, and employees to reminisce about the good times and bad times at the big quad-oval where Georgia does NASCAR.