The years were long, though the signs were everywhere that once  upon a time, racing here was a pastime and a privilege. The once-bright paint cracked and peeled. The grass grew long in the cracks in the concrete where a hospitality village once sat and where corporate bigwigs schmoozed. Only the bare skeleton of what once was the backstretch grandstand still remains, a few pathetic pilings in the concrete is all that’s left of what was once a sea of people rising among the gently rolling hills. It was silent — too silent — for all too long.

And then they returned.

Sunday marked the first time in half a decade that North Carolina Speedway — newly dubbed Rockingham Speedway — trembled with the thrum of motors and the voices of fans. Sure, a few teams had tested there over the years, but the heart of the matter — the racing and the fans — were too-long absent from the little oval nestled neatly in the North Carolina sand hills.

The return of racing to the track affectionately known as The Rock was the end of a journey begun last year by a journeyman. And it was done just in the nick of time.

Rockingham Speedway lay in what was once the cradle of American stock car racing. Ironically, that is exactly what became the one-mile oval’s undoing, as NASCAR began to expand to markets far from its cozy Southeast roots, it began to phase out some of the old staples of the sport. Darlington Raceway lost what was once the oldest and most prestigious race of them all, the Southern 500, when NASCAR decided to move its coveted Labor Day race from the track still too tough to tame to bland, vanilla, California Speedway. Yet Darlington fared better than The Rock.

Rockingham lost the better of its two dates as the result of a narrow-minded lawsuit, and was left with only one February race date. Citing poor attendance (it is often cold and rainy in North Carolina in February and NASCAR knew that), the sanctioning body saw fit to take away the second date as well, leaving the track as an empty reminder to the locals of better days when racing ruled.

So the grass grew long and the cracks widened — the first signs of decay that come with virtual abandonment. Finally, a day that had long been dreaded, as inevitable as it was, arrived. The track was to be sold at auction. The highest bidder would hold the deed to a racing tradition, to do with it whatever he or she wished. Many feared that, like so many other racetracks whose heydays were past, North Carolina Speedway would simply become a memory, razed by a developer’s bulldozers. At best, a race team might buy it as a test facility and sell it later when even testing there was no longer profitable.

Instead, when the auctioneer’s gavel fell, it was journeyman racer Andy Hillenburg who had placed the winning bid and, as it turned out, had much bigger and better plans for the little speedway than a strip mall or condominium complex. Both an ARCA/Remax Series race and a Hooter’s Pro Cup Series race were added to the schedule for 2008, and just like that, the Rock was back.

This past Sunday, the track roared back to life with the ARCA race. Many in attendance were locals, for whom the race had been a long time coming. It was as much celebration as sporting event, with locals telling stories of past glory and an almost electric excitement filled the air. After all, they realized they could have easily been standing in the parking lot of a mall or the street of a new housing development. Hillenburg could have run for mayor that day and won in a landslide, the ovation he received was tremendous and grateful.

The race began with fireworks shooting into the Carolina blue sky from each corner as the race leader passed them, celebrating the gritty mile’s return to what it was always meant for. The crowd, a large one for a stand-alone ARCA race, rose to its feet as the motors sang, echoing from the high banks and threw back a joyful noise of their own; cries that had, until that day, been suppressed. It was beautiful in its simplicity. Just another Sunday at The Rock and yet, so much more.

Time has, in some ways, still passed Rockingham Speedway by. With the explosion of popularity in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series, the facility would require a major overhaul to host a race for that series again — an overhaul that would likely cost far too much for the new entrepreneur Hillenburg to foot.  It would not, however, be impossible or even terribly difficult to return the Nationwide or Craftsman Truck Series to Rockingham. It would be, in a world where the old time fans feel alienated and even the new fans complain about boring racing, a huge coup for NASCAR. Bringing back tradition and great racing the fans have craved since that bleak day when North Carolina Speedway first closed the gates. Thank goodness those gates have opened again.

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