NASCAR set to Return to North Wilkesboro For the 2023 All-Star Race

With the NASCAR playoffs underway in the month of September, it has been unknown what the 2023 NASCAR Schedule was going to look like. However, a big chunk that has kept fans waiting about next season’s schedule was revealed in the form of the All-Star Race.

On Thursday, NASCAR along with Speedway Motorsports met in Raleigh, North Carolina to make the big announcement that consisted of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, NASCAR Chief Operating Officer Steve O’Donnell, Speedway Motorsports President and CEO Marcus Smith, and Hall of Famer Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was in a Late Model Stock competition during the track’s revival of short-track events there last month.

The All-Star Race weekend will take place May 19-21, 2023 as part of celebrating NASCAR’s 75th season. North Wilkesboro was an original track on the schedule during NASCAR’s inaugural season in 1949. It became an annual stop on the schedule, hosting two races a year starting in 1951 and running all the way until shutting its doors on Sept. 29, 1996, when Jeff Gordon took the checkered flag that day. Speedway Motorsports purchased the track, moving one date to a newly-built Texas Motor Speedway, and the other purchased by New Hampshire, a track also now owned by SMI.

For the longest time, except for a brief period in the early 2010s, the track sat just about abandoned and did not host any racing events. That was until an $18 million allocation from the federal American Rescue Plan moved through the N.C. state budget. This allowed for the track to get the necessary funding for improvements to the infrastructure, as well as an additional $4M grant from the general assembly for facility upgrades for the May 2023 event.

“There’s a lot of work to be done. There’s a lot of details that we won’t have today, but we’re going to we’re going to get there,” Marcus Smith said. “I expect this to be a NASCAR All-Star week of activities.”

The track will need many upgrades to be put in place in time for the All-Star race. The events held in August at the track used portable toilets, and concessions involved local vendors in food trucks and stands. The track is also without a working scoreboard and energy-absorbing SAFER barriers for the retaining walls, and the former press box facilities and restrooms were inaccessible. The original plan for North Wilkesboro had been for the track to host dirt racing in October in-between its old asphalt being torn up and new asphalt being laid down but was canceled a day before the announcement was made for the 2023 All-Star Race.

“North Wilkesboro is going to remain historic, and it will remain authentic, but it will also be modern, and that will be a great thing to see,” Dale Earnhardt Jr said. “So I’m excited to see the progress, all the things that will be happening there over the next couple of months. The rebuilding and so forth is going to be a lot of fun to watch, and then to finally go there in May, just can’t get here fast enough.”

North Wilkesboro will become the fifth track to host the NASCAR All-Star Race after Texas Motor Speedway hosted it in 2021 and 2022. The other times the All-Star Race was held outside of Charlotte (1985, 1987-2019) were Atlanta (1986), and Bristol (2020).

The full NASCAR Cup Series schedule is expected to be announced soon, which already features the return of the Busch Light Clash to the L.A. Coliseum and the first Cup Series race on a street circuit in Chicago.

“But as you look at evolving your schedule,” O’Donnell said, “you can’t forget about your past.”