Save Southside Speedway

A Silent Forge of Legends

In 1948, Nelson Royall leased a few acres of land from what was then Wilkerson farm and built a dirt racetrack in Chesterfield, Virginia, south of the James River. In 2020, after sixty seasons of races, Southside Speedway permanently closed its gates. It was the track that built Ray Hendrick, Denny Hamlin, and Joe Weatherly — names tied to legends known only amongst the fraternity called NASCAR, where drivers and fans alike bask in the semi-secret glow of now-dimming starlight seeping from stock cars that once sped across the “Toughest Short Track in the South.”

COVID killed it. When the government restrictions slammed shut the gates of Southside just days before its sixty-first season, the utilities and leasing costs continued. It was a death sentence to the track, which still sits right off Genito Road in Midlothian, now decaying and crumbling into dust after two years of neglect. But this is only the end of the story. To understand what we really lost here, we have to travel back to the beginning.

When you’re born and raised in a place called Powhatan or Goochland (or in Chesterfield or Hanover or Brunswick or any number of places with names so illustrious), the decay is cast in an even more accentuated light than it otherwise would be. All you can do is go elsewhere and tune up your car. In the times before cars were invented, you couldn’t even do that. All you could do was drink.

And for about thirteen years, you couldn’t even do that, at least not legally. Of course, the mass banning of alcohol coincided with the mass introduction of consumer automobiles, which were finally making their way into rural backwaters. So having traded drinking for tuning up their cars, a great many bored rednecks decided that they wanted both, realizing that they could use their cars to get their booze. They got so good at it that they turned it into a business.

Turns out that it doesn’t take an MIT engineer to tune up a car to outrun federal agents. All it takes is a bunch of rednecks who spent their lives figuring out farm equipment with too much time on their hands and too much crazy behind their eyes. Of course, after Prohibition got lifted, these crazy-eyed rednecks were left with all cars and no business. So, like good capitalists, they turned their cars into their business, and stock car racing was born. 

In 1948, Bill France founded the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing, or NASCAR, and the fresh-off-VJ-Day South suddenly had another cool thing to do. Dirt tracks were built left and right in every small town in Dixie — towns like Martinsville, VA, Greenville, SC, and Byron, GA. Legends too were built, like Red Byron, Junior Johnson, and Ralph Earnhardt. Men who single-handedly lifted themselves and their families out of poverty through their skill behind the wheel.

What would become Southside Speedway was no different. After it fell out of the hands of Nelson Royall, what was first called Royall Speedway entered its heyday. In 1961, the first NASCAR cup series race was held on the last showing of this dirt track, which saw Junior Johnson dominate the race by starting in pole and leading every lap. In 1962, the track was paved in time to welcome rising legend Richard Petty to a third place finish. Though dropped from the Winston Cup series, Southside was used for NASCAR syndicated races into the early ’00s.

Southside’s earliest and most flamboyant home-grown legend was Joe Weatherly. Weatherly cut his teeth racing in Southside’s early days, having started as a motorcycle racer but showing a prodigious talent for stock car racing. Whenever he wasn’t partying or drinking until four in the morning, he was investing what little money he had left into the Richmond Fairgrounds opposite the James River. This eventually grew into Richmond Raceway. Weatherly’s untimely death in 1964 was not the first in NASCAR’s history, but it was the first bad one, as Weatherly went through the inconvenience of winning a Winston Cup before he was flung out of his Ford after a crash at Riverside International Raceway. Some legends are flashes in the pan.

Ray Hendrick was by no means a flash in the pan. Over the course of his career, he won over seven hundred victories in various series and rulesets, earning the nickname “Mr. Modified” due to his dominance in the modified stock car series. While the aforementioned Martinsville, Virginia is where he etched his record twenty victories and the fame that followed, he always called Southside home. It was at Southside that another Hendrick (no relation), a legend-in-waiting in his own right, worked in his pit crew. Now, Rick Hendrick owned the most successful team of its era. Some legends are built over time and light the paths of successors, long after the cheers of crowds died into silent photos of days past.

In the late ’90s, a young prodigy emerged from the Go-Kart scene and ended up winning two Daytona 500s in a row — a feat Dale Earnhardt couldn’t even match. That prodigy went by the name of Denny Hamlin, and he seemed to rise like a meteor through the ranks of NASCAR’s syndicated series. Born in Tampa but raised in Chesterfield, Denny Hamlin spent his formative years dominating Southside Speedway, alongside every other short track he ever raced on. Keep that in mind next time you watch him at Martinsville, because legends are made every day, even in modernity.

You see, dear reader, every profession, every sport, every field of study, every alma mater, every town, every nation, and every family of families has its own elite, its own “one percent,” its own aristocracy. And each of us possesses a blank ticket of admittance, admittance into any number of aristocracies, stories, “one percents.” We must merely write the destination on our ticket, how much we’re willing to pay for it, and hand it off to the conductor called Almighty God and see how far we can go.

Southside Speedway is cluttered with these tickets– tickets branded with names lit by stars: Hendrick, Weatherly, Hamlin– but also thousands of others with names as insignificant as the shrubs and weeds that overgrow the abandoned track. Tickets that brought their passengers to other stations, that the stars could reach theirs.

Give me no longer the South of Greek columns and mint juleps; they’re so in-baked that they’ll never vanish. Give me the South of Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough, of Bill Elliot and Dale Earnhardt, of Richard Byrd and Claire Chennault, of Oak Ridge and NASA. Give me the South that shattered history in revenge for history shattering it, be it in the driver's seat of Dale Earnhardt’s black No. 3, or the cockpit of the Space Shuttle.

But give me back Southside Speedway. Give us back Southside Speedway. That the ground these heroes trod be not paved over for yet another shopping center. It’ll take fifteen million dollars, probably even more, but what’s the use of money if we can’t use it to keep the things we love running?

In 2020, Southside Speedway sent a farewell letter to its supporters which concluded with this:

For generations, there has been a Southside Speedway. We are grateful that you were a part of its story.

And for generations to come, there will still be a Southside Speedway. Its work is not yet over.

https://www.savesouthsidespeedway.com/