Rougemont's Incorporated Raceway

Less than 3 weeks until the Great American Race, as we take a slight detour towards the north of North Carolina where we find the Orange County Speedway.

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nice touch with the OCS right outside turn 2

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Overview and History

Billed as the fastest 3/8ths of a mile speedway in America, the Orange County Speedway opened its doors for racing in 1966 just outside of Durham in Rougemont, North Carolina. Opening originally as a quarter mile dirt track named Trico Speedway, it was eventually lengthened to 5/8ths of a mile and operated from 1967 to 1973 in this capacity. The track hosted a Grand National East event in its seemingly final year, a race won by Buddy Baker in the middle of May right at the height of the oil crisis.

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The track was reprofiled and reopened in 1983 as a smaller 3/8ths of a mile oval with 19 degrees of banking in the turns and a whopping 16 on the straights. Such drastic renovations created multiple grooves of racing, and could only be worth attracting the stars of stock car racing, and boy did they do so getting the NASCAR Busch Series still in its relative infancy for its reopening season. They didn’t just get one date per year; 1983 saw 4 races at the Rougemont track that season, 3 of them within a span of a few weeks in the early half of summer when Irene Cara was dominating the music charts.

from the air the track doesn't look less than half a mile

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Jack Ingram won the first race in the middle of June 1983 leading the final 94 laps consecutively; Tommy Houston took the next 2 races in consecutive weeks either side of Independence Day. The track saw 3 Busch dates in 1984, but went down to 2 per year from 1985 to 1993. In that time, names like Ingram, Houston, Sam Ard, Larry Pearson, Dale Jarrett, Ward Burton, Chuck Bown, Robert Pressley, Rick Mast, Jimmy Spencer, and Mark Martin all saw victory lane in Rougemont. Hermie Sadler won the second 1993 race, and won the final Busch Race at Orange County Speedway at the end of April 1994 under dubious circumstances, as the top 2 cars of Sadler and Ricky Craven spun with Dennis Setzer getting past for the lead, only for the win to be awarded to Sadler because he took the caution flag first.

imagine if something like this happened today, wild scenes this was

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By the turn of the 21st century, the speedway was getting in bad shape and had to close down by 2003. It’d be a series that once frequented the speedway that’d swoop in to save it, with the track reopening again in March 2006 as an ASA member track under new management. In recent years, the CARS Tour in its various forms have been the principal touring series to frequent Orange County, returning in 2012 after a one-off race 15 years prior in 1997 and staying for a decade through the pandemic.

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Did You Know?

- Orange County Speedway was one of the first tracks to have the Busch Series races televised live, the first being the June 1990 race polesitted by Jeff Burton (the first of his career) and won by eventual champion Chuck Bown.

- The track is a part of the North Carolina Moonshine and Motorsports Trail, highlighting significant places that sped along the development of stock car racing after Prohibition

- Dale Jarrett scored his first major NASCAR victory at Orange County Speedway in the 1986 August Busch Series race, leading from flag to flag for all 150 laps.

- Emporia, Virginia’s Elliott’s Sadler’s first race was at this track, in a yellow #16 car qualifying 10th and getting taken out by getting put into the wall (his words from a FOX segment during 2001 Texas qualifying, not mine).

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I guess he turned out to be a good driver after that first race, eh?

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Orange County Speedway is set for another full season of weekly racing, along with the return of the CARS Tour on April 26th, 2025.

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shoutout to the tiny suite in turn 4

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On the next episode of 2025 Daytona 500 Countdown...

You and I are gonna learn a LOT more about this track in this upcoming race week...