Concord, North Carolina · US
The heart of NASCAR country. This 1.5-mile quad-oval hosts the Coca-Cola 600, the longest race on the NASCAR calendar, plus the ROVAL road course configuration.
Charlotte Motor Speedway is an oval speedway in Concord, North Carolina. The lap measures 2.414 km (1.5 miles) across 4 corners, run anti-clockwise.
It opened in 1960. Series racing here include NASCAR and Oval. Capacity is around 95,000 spectators.
Bruton Smith and Curtis Turner — a promoter and one of stock car racing's early stars — began building a 1.5-mile superspeedway outside Charlotte in 1959. They broke ground and found granite under the topsoil. Clearing the first turn alone took $70,000 of dynamite, and a $750,000 budget became $2 million.
The first World 600 ran on 19 June 1960, but the debt had already caught them. By the end of 1961 they owed more than a million dollars, and the speedway went into bankruptcy proceedings that cost both men control of it. Turner died in a plane crash in 1970. Smith regained ownership in 1975 and kept it for the rest of his life, turning the track into the sport's most heavily promoted venue and, in 2018, adding the infield road course that makes up the Roval.
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