With or without NASCAR, Rockingham is nearing revival. What that means to this NC town

Ronnie Rollins still remembers scaling one of the cluster of pine trees just outside Rockingham’s most vaunted venue and climbing high enough so he could see.

It was October 1965, and the then-21-year-old Rollins didn’t have the $10 to secure a ticket to the speedway’s inaugural NASCAR Cup Series race. Neither did his buddies. So the group of them walked around just outside the backstretch of then-named North Carolina Motor Speedway and watched Curtis Turner, the popular but aging driver, steal a win over a young Cale Yarborough.

“He was driving with some broken ribs,” Rollins told The Charlotte Observer on Saturday, “if I remember that story correct.”

He’d remembered that correctly.

The 80-year-old Richmond County resident, wearing a mustached smile and a U.S. Veterans hat and a white shirt with Richard “The King” Petty art emblazoned on it, remembered something else clearly, too:

“It was always a thrill to get here to the track.”

On Saturday, Rockingham Speedway put on an open house, an event where community members from Richmond County gathered to get a sneak peek at the newly renovated racetrack and celebrated the racetrack’s potential resurrection. Rollins was one of hundreds of community members — including city and county leaders — to attend the event.

They all did so because they wanted to let their eyes answer the question for themselves:

Is Rockingham Speedway truly coming back?

For decades, after all, the famed 1.017-mile oval in south central North Carolina was a staple on the NASCAR Cup Series. Champions were occasionally crowned there. The sport — the country — congregated here in February 2001, a week after the death of Dale Earnhardt.

But in 2004, NASCAR left and never meaningfully came back, and as a result, the track thereafter rotted in abandoned disrepair. Weeds seeped through the cracked pavement. Buildings crumbled. Water rendered the grandstands dangerous. Richmond County suffered economically because of it. Culturally, too.

But Saturday made those days feel like a distant past. And not only because NASCAR is embracing the older tracks it long ago left — but also simply because of the condition Rockingham was in.

Saturday was a show of how far the track had come. It was a demonstration of how close the track was to its fully renovated and realized version of itself. And it was a chance for Dan Lovenheim, the daring racetrack owner who purchased the venue in 2018, to share his vision with the community.

On Saturday, during a special presentation fit with videos in the pit garage at the facility, Lovenheim addressed the crowd’s largest and most immediate question head-on:

When will NASCAR be back?

“And the answer is soon,” he told the crowd. “We understand the importance of bringing high-level racing back to Rockingham Speedway. And we are diligently (working) to do that in a number of areas. We will have very good, positive news for you soon. Please be patient with us. And we see very good times ahead.”

How does Rockingham Speedway look so good so fast?

You don’t need to prompt Stephen Gluck of Moore County much to get him looking out onto Rockingham racetrack and into the past. Gluck, leaning over an infield gate as cars laid down laps on Saturday, was once a construction worker on this very site decades ago, he said.

“Funny story,” Gluck began. “Tornado came through (in the 90s), and we saw the port-a-john go down the backstretch. 120 miles an hour.”

Gluck remembered this story and others — he was there for the race in 2001 where the entire crowd held up three fingers, still stunned from Earnhardt’s death — on Saturday. He said bringing the racetrack back into the community’s purview is important.

“It would mean a lot,” he said.

Saturday wasn’t only for the longtime Richmond County residents or the lifelong race fans. It was for everyone. Take Joe Julio and Mary Ann Cullen, a couple who are each from the midwest who now live in Sanford. Julio arrived in North Carolina 14 years ago, Cullen came four years ago — both after NASCAR left.

Still, they can’t wait to see the racetrack resurrected.

“A big deal,” Julio said of what Saturday foreshadowed.

Said Cullen: “It brings back memories when you were a kid.”

“The economic impact is one thing,” Rockingham city manager Monty Crump told The Observer. “But it’s also the identity. You know, when you’re a small community, a rural community, and you say, ‘Rockingham,’ everyone knows Rockingham. Because of the speedway. It’s that connection. That is important.”

Preserving those memories and connections — and creating new ones — doesn’t come without a cost. In November 2021, the North Carolina state budget earmarked about $50 million dollars to go toward renovating three speedways — Charlotte, North Wilkesboro and Rockingham — which was made available via North Carolina’s cut of a federal post-pandemic stimulus package that had passed in February 2021. Rockingham was announced to receive about $9 million of that sum.

The racetrack, per Lovenheim, received approximately $3 million of that sum initially. That money was used to repave the venue’s main 1.017-mile oval in December 2022, a move that furnished some local media buzz and got Rockingham back on the sport of racing’s radar. The rest has been used to uplift the rest of the track. Construction is ongoing.

The rest of the money to facelift the speedway has come from Lovenheim himself, who purchased the racetrack in 2018 after making a name and a fortune for bringing nightlife to Glenwood South in downtown Raleigh.

He said earlier this summer — and reiterated Saturday — that making the track “NASCAR-ready” is always at the top of everyone’s minds. And that is a priority of the racetrack.

But the goal is to also have the racetrack be in use every week of the year — whether that be putting on a racing series of its own, called the Crown 9 Series which will begin in August, or hosting racing camps or whatever else. Lovenheim told The Observer earlier this year that he expects every weekend of 2025 to be booked up by the end of 2024.

The goal, in other words, is to renovate the entire complex properly and make it something the entire community can benefit from — not just NASCAR. That means not just prioritizing Big Rock, the famed 1.015-mile oval, but also prioritizing Little Rock (the short track also on the property) and other parts of the venue that could moonlight as concert venues, Christmas light shows — anything worth imagining, Lovenheim said.

And imaginations ran rampant Saturday. You didn’t need to search for them. All you had to do was ask the throngs of people who were around — who were looking around the renovated track in wonder.

“When the NASCAR races left, that broke my heart,” Rollins, the aforementioned Richmond County resident, said. “And most of the community felt the same way. They really were disappointed.”

As for if NASCAR racing came back to Rockingham?

“I’d be here every time the gates were open,” Rollins said. “And I’ll be here supporting them for whatever they’re fixing to do now.”