Kentucky Speedway

By Kevin Kelly

The history of Kentucky Speedway is as colorful as the flags waved from its flag stand and the cars that dart around its 1.5-mile track. The path to its position on NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series schedule included more twists and turns than the roads leading to Sparta, Kentucky. Ultimately, it took Speedway Motorsports Inc. buying the track from its founders in 2008 for developer Jerry Carroll's vision to be realized three years later when the venue hosted its inaugural Quaker State 400. It is all part of the history of a speedway that brought a major-league sport to the Bluegrass State.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Mar 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781439650356

Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly lives in Central New York with his wife, Rebecca, their two kids and a shaggy black dog. Kevin owns a small graphic design shop with a variety of interesting clients, and when he’s not hard at work, he’s usually busy figuring out how to finish one of Rebecca’s famously convoluted projects. Kevin and family spend their free time playing, hiking and vacationing off-the-grid in Coastal Maine—and napping.

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INTRODUCTION

The story of how Kentucky Speedway landed on NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series is as improbable as it is true.

The visionary behind the track was northern Kentucky real estate developer Jerry Carroll. Active in the state’s horse racing industry, he had no experience in motor sports but knew the sport was expanding in the 1990s and sensed an opportunity. Carroll rounded up the private investors, earned support from state officials, found and secured the property in Gallatin County—the smallest county by area in Kentucky—and commenced to building a track with the expressed purpose of someday bringing NASCAR’s top racing series to the Bluegrass State.

Kentucky Speedway experienced some growing pains early on, and Carroll was unsuccessful in multiple bids to buy a Cup Series race date from other track owners, but it gained a reputation as a first-rate venue that drew large crowds, featured a unique racing surface that made for entertaining racing, and produced a number of first-time winners who would go on to achieve acclaim in their profession. It took selling the track to Speedway Motorsports Inc. (SMI) in 2008 before Carroll’s ultimate dream could be realized.

SMI saw potential in Kentucky Speedway, and as the owner of seven tracks with spots on the Cup Series schedule, it had the resources available to move one of its dates to Kentucky. But first, there was work that needed to be done and a lawsuit that stood in the way. The former owners filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR and International Speedway Corp. in 2005 and retained the rights to the suit when they sold to SMI in 2008. The case was defeated at every turn and ended in May 2010, opening the door for SMI to move one of Atlanta Motor Speedway’s two Cup Series races to Kentucky.

In August 2010, SMI executive chairman Bruton Smith made good on his promise to bring Kentucky Speedway the long-awaited Cup Series race, and he made the announcement inside a sweltering tent teeming with dignitaries, local and national media, and just ordinary folks who wanted to see what the fuss was about.

The fuss was that it became the first new venue brought onto the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series schedule since Chicagoland Speedway and Kansas Speedway were added in 2001 and one of just 23 tracks nationwide to hold a Sprint Cup race.

Only one other time had NASCAR’s elite division stopped in Kentucky—on August 29, 1954, at Corbin Speedway in southeastern Kentucky. The race on the half-mile dirt oval was won by Lee Petty, the patriarch of the racing Pettys. He averaged 63.08 mph in a 1954 Chrysler. Hershel McGriff finished second followed by Buck Baker and Herb Thomas. Petty, Baker, and Thomas are enshrined in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

The major-league sport was coming back to Kentucky, but the speedway had to get ready. Smith and SMI spent about $100 million to improve parking, expand camping, move the pit road 200 feet closer to the grandstands, and add 40,000 seats through the construction of a pair of grandstand towers to bring seating capacity to 107,000. The inaugural Sprint Cup race was won by Kyle Busch in 2011 but marred by the gridlock outside the track, prompting millions more in infrastructure work to be done on-site and nearby on top of the $100 million spent by SMI to ready the venue for the Cup Series. The fixes worked and Brad Keselowski beat the heat in 2012 to win the second Quaker State 400 en route to capturing the Sprint Cup title. In 2013, the race was postponed a day by rain and contested in the daytime for the first time. Matt Kenseth won. In 2014, Keselowski became the first two-time winner in the event’s history.

Opened in 2000, Kentucky Speedway has hosted numerous forms of racing, including the IndyCar Series, NASCAR’s Xfinity Series and Camping World Truck Series, the ARCA Racing Series, and major entertainment events from rock and country concerts to monster trucks. The list of race winners includes some of the biggest names in motor sports such as Busch, Keselowski, Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards, Joey Logano, Ryan Newman, Kevin Harvick, and Ron Hornaday in NASCAR; Helio Castroneves, Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, and Sam Hornish Jr. in IndyCar; and Frank