Charlotte the only place for NASCAR hall

By DAVID GREEN

It appears that the new NASCAR Hall of Fame is headed for Charlotte, according to a story in the Observer. That's where it belongs.

The notion that the shrine is nothing more than a potential cash cow for an already excessively wealthy sanctioning body is an argument I won't get into. Given the number of museums and halls of fame dedicated to auto racing, there may be some question about the validity of another one, but I won't debate that here.

I'll limit my comments to the real estate maxim of "location, location, location." If we're going to have this, it should be in Charlotte.

Charlotte, after all, is the center of the stock car racing universe. If that's not a lead-pipe cinch, it's a hard argument to refute. It has the strongest combination of heritage and present-day clout of all the potential sites that were bidding for the shrine.

With its speed trials dating from the early 1900s, Daytona has one of the oldest ties to motorsports of any location. It has NASCAR's flagship speedway, and it's the site of NASCAR headquarters.

But Charlotte has some long-in-the-tooth racing heritage, as well. It was the site of the first race in Bill France's Strictly Stock series, which has grown into Nextel Cup.

Not only that, but in the 1920s, Charlotte was the site of one of the high-banked tracks with wooden surfaces, overgrown versions of bicycle racing velodromes, that sprang up in the first two decades of the 20th century. The board tracks were a harbinger of the high-banked speedways that now are best known for their NASCAR races.

It's true that there were board tracks in places such as Miami, Los Angeles and other cities -- including Kansas City, which was also a bidder for the NASCAR museum. But it was northeast of Charlotte where, in 1960, Bruton Smith and Curtis Turner carved out a 1.5-mile, asphalt-paved, modern version of one of the old board tracks.

That track helped launched the modern superspeedway era, and until the NBA and NFL made their way to the region, stock car racing was the only big-time sport in town. It was Charlotte, not Daytona Beach, not Atlanta, and not Kansas City or Richmond, that gave stock car racing intense media coverage -- not just when the show was in town, but year-round.

I've always been quick to argue the notion that stock car racing was exclusively a southeastern sport. There's interest in big-time NASCAR racing and grassroots short-track competition in every region of the country, if not every state, and standout drivers have been produced by every region. That's true not only of today, but throughout the sport's history.

But the sport did rise toward the major league level in the southeast; the Carolinas were smack in the middle of the geographic region and the heated interest in the sport; and Charlotte is smack in the middle of the Carolinas.

That's where the soul of the sport is best exemplified. And that's where this hall belongs.