NASCAR At North Wilkesboro Was Always An All-Star Spectacle
As the Cup Series returns to the restored North Carolina track, a look back at the star-studded leaderboards the track always produced.
One of the charms of the eponymous Speedway in North Wilkesboro, NC, is its old-school leaderboard: a bright red billboard situated over Turn 3, operated by a local family and updated manually as the cars whiz by. When the NASCAR world returned to the track this week for its All-Star festivities, it marked the first time North Wilkesboro has hosted the series since 1996 — and the now-restored venue has certainly seen a lot of changes since then. But the iconic scoreboard still contained the ranking and numbers of the Top 5 drivers from the last race held: 24 (Jeff Gordon), 3 (Dale Earnhardt Sr.), 88 (Dale Jarrett), 99 (Jeff Burton) and 5 (Terry Labonte).
That’s an All-Star-worthy quintet of drivers — four Hall of Famers, plus a guy nicknamed the “Mayor of NASCAR” (who also made the Top 75 Drivers list and probably will be a HOFer sooner or later). But it wasn’t out of the norm for North Wilkesboro. Long before the venerable old short track will have made its All-Star Race debut on Sunday, it was producing great groups of drivers on that big leaderboard.
During the 1996 season as a whole, Gordon (276), Earnhardt (200), Jarrett (248), Burton (129) and Labonte (249) collectively had an average Pts+ of 221, meaning their adjusted points per race was 121% better than the Cup Series average. That gave the Tyson Holly Farms 400 — the final race at North Wilkesboro — the fourth-most successful Top 5 of any race during the 1996 season. (No. 1 belonged to another short track, Bristol, which produced a ridiculously great Top 5 of Rusty Wallace, Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, Dale Jarrett and Terry Labonte in August 1996.)
North Wilkesboro’s spring 1996 race didn’t create a Top 5 quite as prestigious — Robert Pressley’s 51 Pts+ drags the average down — but that was an exception to the track’s usual rule. The all-time leading winner at North Wilkesboro was The King, Richard Petty, with 15 trips to victory lane; No. 2 on the list was Darrell Waltrip, followed by Dale Sr. and Cale Yarborough. It was a place where winners won, a lot.
Over the course of exactly 50 events during NASCAR’s modern era (since 1972), the average Top 5 for Cup Series races at North Wilkesboro had a collective Pts+ of 184.3. No other track that held at least 10 races over that span produced better quintets atop the leaderboard on average:
So it’s fitting that the first trip back to North Wilkesboro since 1996 — excluding exhibition races, the most recent of which was won in virtual form by Denny Hamlin (another one of history’s great drivers) — would be an All-Star Race. NASCAR’s best drivers had been making themselves at home on the track’s rough, 0.625-mile surface for decades before the sport departed it. And there’s no doubt they’ll put on a great show this weekend as well.
Filed under: NASCAR