ROCKINGHAM, N.C. -- The date was March 3, 1991, so long ago that Kyle Petty was one of the hottest drivers in NASCAR. Andy Hillenburg was an obscure rookie driver making his first start in what was then known as the Winston Cup Series.

Having founded the Fast Track High Performance Driving School for aspiring racers only two years earlier, Hillenburg had qualified to start 32nd in a field of 40 cars. He did so while driving a car that normally was used by students in his driving school.

"The bad part was it also had a driving school engine in it. We probably had 10,000 miles on the thing," Hillenburg said.

That became evident on Lap 6 of the GM Goodwrench 500 at North Carolina Speedway, a nifty 1.017-mile oval long thought of as a driver's dream.

"That was the first time I ever spun out a stock car," said Hillenburg, a native of Indianapolis who also once drove an open-wheel car in the Indianapolis 500. "Going into Turn 3 very early in the race, the crankshaft broke in half and locked up -- and I did a 360 through 3 and 4. I stopped, and didn't even know what had happened until I tried to re-fire the motor and realized that I blew an engine. That was my first foray into Cup racing."

Hillenburg was 28 years old then. He could not have envisioned that at 45, nearly five years into his retirement as a driver with limited success, he would own the place where he made his Cup debut before a packed house of roughly 64,500 rabid NASCAR fans.

Cup racing left the place affectionately known as the Rock on Feb. 22, 2004, when Matt Kenseth won the Subway 400 there. Having lost its more coveted fall Cup race a year earlier when it was moved to Phoenix, about 50,000 fans showed up to witness the track's Cup finale.

The facility's final race date basically was bought and sold by Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman Bruton Smith, who used the purchase to secure a second annual Cup date for Texas Motor Speedway. The Rock subsequently sat dormant, ignored and largely forgotten, for the next four and a half years until SMI sold it at auction to Hillenburg for $4.4 million in October of 2007.

"Owning a race track is something I've wanted to do for a long time -- but I never imagined owning this particular one," Hillenburg said. "I just feel like it's a jewel that fell out of the pocket, and we were there to pick it up. There is so much history and tradition here."

The catch

A fan donated a sign advertising the first race at the track in 1965.

When he arrived at auction to place what proved to be the winning bid for the track, Hillenburg was hopeful but not certain he was going to walk away with his jewel. And as he would soon find out, he wasn't quite sure exactly what he was getting himself into.

"I felt like I had a chance at it. But I don't want to say I thought I would get it," Hillenburg said. "A lot of times, I believe that things work out like they're supposed to -- and at the auction, if I wasn't the only one, I was one of the very few who wanted to keep racing here. I think that might have had something to do with it.

"There were those who supposedly wanted to buy it and sell it off piece by piece. There were rumors of the scrap deal, and there were rumors of [it being used for] government training exercises. And actually [Cup owner Richard] Childress did bid on it, just for a testing facility. There was a lot of that stuff."

Hillenburg wanted no part of any of the above. He wanted to buy the Rock for only one reason -- to bring racing back to it. He promised to do so within 13 months of making the purchase.

Only a few weeks earlier, Hillenburg had placed a phone call to his longtime friend, general contractor and home builder Robert Ingraham. They had known each other for more than 20 years.

"I'm gonna buy the speedway," Hillenburg told Ingraham.

Ingraham thought he might have a bad connection.

"You're doing what?" he asked, incredulous.

"I'm gonna buy the speedway," Hillenburg said.

Not long thereafter, Ingraham's phone rang again. Hillenburg was on the other end and matter-of-factly stated, "Well, I bought it."

"You did WHAT???" Ingraham shouted into the phone.

Hillenburg was calling this time with an offer. He wanted Ingraham to help bring the Rock back to life. There were fences and walls to be rebuilt and repaired. There was grass to be mowed, shrubbery to be pulled out and replaced, buildings to be refurbished. There were all kinds of things for a general contractor to get his hands on.

Ingraham agreed to help out with what he could. Semi-retired and playing lots of golf 20 minutes down Highway 1 in Pinehurst, N.C., Ingraham soon discovered there was more to the "part-time job" than he thought.

"He asked me to come and help bring a place that had been asleep for four and a half years back awake. I mean, there are over 800 toilets in this place. It's 254 acres that had been sleeping," Ingraham said. "I don't get to play as much golf as I once played. But I'm having fun."

Eventually, with Ingraham doing more and more, Hillenburg asked him to come on-board full time as director of operations. That deal was consummated right before Hillenburg made good on his promise to bring racing back to the Rock within 13 months of his purchase, as he hosted the first of a pair of 2008 ARCA races at the facility.

There was much to be done to make it race-ready again. One day Ingraham placed a call to Ronnie Chavis, the longtime general manager of the facility and caretaker of the place during its dormant years. Ingraham wanted to make sure he wouldn't compromise anything by doing some serious digging around the place.

"Ronnie, I'm getting ready to dig a hole. Where can I not dig?" Ingraham asked.

"You can dig anywhere you want to, just don't dig in the infield," Chavis replied.

"Why is that?"

"You've got to remember that one of the guys who once ran this place was in the funeral home business. We don't know what's buried in there."

Two weeks prior to the first ARCA event, one of Hillenburg and Ingraham's workers spied a fox roaming in the infield. Several touchy phone calls and one trapping permit from the local game warden later (he threatened to arrest Ingraham if he didn't get the permit first), the fox was caught and planning for the event continued.

When the purchase of the track was made, the massive backstretch grandstands were not included in the sale. Bruton Smith wanted to take them out and use them in a drag strip he was planning to build near Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, where he transplanted the 30,000 seats (they comprise the John Force Grandstand at that facility).

That left Hillenburg with 34,500 seats. He and Ingraham wondered how many they could fill for the ARCA races -- and were pleasantly surprised when they drew an estimated crowd of 18,000 for the second event that determined the ARCA champion last spring. They knew local fans were embittered over the sudden loss of the Cup races years earlier, but what they found was that their anger was not necessarily directed toward them.

The facility also drew 15,000 for the Polar Bear 150, a street stock race held last Jan. 1. And it drew 10,000 for a USAR Pro Cup Series event.

"I think their bitterness is more toward NASCAR, and more toward Bruton. They're thinking like, 'Hey, you took our race away.' It's not about us. It's about what happened to them. It's kind of like a jilted lover, so to speak," Ingraham said of the fans.

"But the fan who does come back has a good time and maybe tells a friend. And then they find out we're selling hamburgers for a dollar less today than we did in 2004. So we're getting a few more back at a time every day."

Hillenburg added: "I think we're over that. We got here to get it going again, so we've gotten very big support. There have been a lot of people that come to our races who hadn't been to races in a number of years, since they lost the [Cup] race."

Shortly after purchasing the track, Hillenburg started receiving unsolicited phone calls from fans. One said he had a sign promoting the very first Cup race ever run at the Rock, won by the legendary Curtis Turner in 1965. It was just sitting in his garage and he wanted Hillenburg to have it. It now sits proudly in Hillenburg's office. Another "fan," who apparently had made off with dozens of photographs and plaques and other memorabilia that had been left behind in the old press box, showed up and delivered boxes of the stuff back to whom he now figured was its rightful owner.

"When the track was sold the first time [to SMI], he didn't trust that stuff not to disappear and he was hoping that someday it could all be put up here again. It's history of the place. He said it belongs here," Hillenburg said.

Hillenburg is cultivating the fan-friendly atmosphere, noting that ticket prices for his two 2009 ARCA races run from $20 to $35 for adults, and $15 for children. Camping outside the track is free, although fans have to pay for premier spots on the backstretch in Thunder Alley or in the infield.

"I feel like you can bring a family of four here and have a great time without breaking the bank," Hillenburg said.

The past and present

Petty, Pearson, Allison, Yarborough -- they're all engraved in stone just outside of the speedway.

Those who won Cup races on the 1.017-mile oval between 1965 and 2004 read like a Who's Who in a catalogue of the best drivers the sport has ever had. Among them: Richard Petty, David Pearson, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Dale Earnhardt, Fred Lorenzen, Donnie Allison, Darrell Waltrip, Bill Elliott, Neil Bonnett, Rusty Wallace and Jeff Gordon. Most won there more than once, as did Kyle Petty -- who not only won the race in 1991 when Hillenburg made his Cup debut but also won three in a row at one point.

You can still see their names engraved on a giant rock in front of the track's modest operational office building. Hillenburg calls that "the Chapter One rock," and proudly shows off what he had hauled in last year and calls "Chapter Two." The second boulder is engraved with the names of winners of events since he took over the operation, including Joey Logano and Clayton Rogers.

Nowadays, the current greats in the sport still come around -- perhaps even more often than in the past, just not in front of huge, adoring crowds. They now come to the Rock to test -- and not only on the oval where the series used to run but on the new half-mile track out back that Hillenburg built to resemble the Martinsville track where the Cup and Truck series still run.

It's all part of Hillenburg's grand plan. He already has officially changed the name of his growing complex to Rockingham Raceway Park. The old track has been renamed Rockingham Speedway, and the new asphalt-and-concrete track -- which also includes an asphalt quarter-mile circuit inside the half-miler -- is called Little Rock.

He now uses the facility as a more permanent home to his once-roaming Fast Track operation, and can offer schools for wannabe drivers now on both short tracks and the oval. He said he has about 30 dates per year booked for those, and envisions more.

“

You start looking at the race fans and what they want, and we're keeping a tradition and an old, glorious race track alive. Those kinds of things, to me, are more important.

”

ANDY HILLENBURG

He also rents out both of his tracks to NASCAR teams looking to test. Business hasn't spiked as much as Hillenburg had hoped since new rules eliminated testing at tracks where NASCAR-sanctioned events are run, but it's brisk enough. Teams pay -- or split with other teams -- fees that generally run about $5,000 per day for up to five cars on one of the tracks. That covers the $1,200 per day that it costs to keep emergency personnel on hand, and then some.

But with a current average of only eight testing dates booked per month, the facility still is struggling to keep all its bills paid and turn a profit most months.

Asked if they're making money, Ingraham replied: "We're not. We're not printing it. But we're still doing a lot of capital improvements."

Hillenburg said that's not the point anyway.

"It's very rewarding to me personally because something that is more important to me than money is respect from your peers. Hard work, treating people fairly, leading by example ... that all translates into getting respect from your peers," Hillenburg said. "Obviously we do need to make money to pay for everything that's here. But that's not the primary goal. You start looking at the race fans and what they want, and we're keeping a tradition and an old, glorious race track alive. Those kinds of things, to me, are more important.

"The only reason I want to make a million dollars within the next few years is so we could build another track. It'll either be a road course or a dirt track. It just depends on how the cost estimates come in. But when we do finally start turning a profit on a regular basis, it will be re-invested into another track to get more series here, more kids here, more driver education and driver school stuff here."

The respect from many of his peers already has arrived.

"Andy Hillenburg is loving life now at the Rockingham track," said Robbie Loomis, director of race operations at Richard Petty Motorsports. "He should get a lot of credit. He's put in a lot of work at that place. At lunchtime, while you're eating your lunch, he'll be out there with the vacuum trucks, running around the race track.

"They take care of the place. It's a first-class facility. I would raise my hand if any sanctioning body came in and asked about racing at that track or that facility. They've done a really, really good job with it. They take care of it well and they keep making improvements to it."

Elliott Sadler, one of several current Cup drivers who has been around long enough to have run on the Rock, added: "It's a shame we don't race there. It's the most fun race track. It's so slippery. You can move around from bottom, middle to the top and just do a lot of different things. It is a great race track to run at. It's fun. It's close to home. We all pretty much went there as kids to watch the races there, so there is a lot of history at that track. It's a shame that we travel way out west to places, but we don't race there."

Hillenburg and Ingraham said they hear that frequently. Carl Edwards recently was testing his Nationwide car on the big track, trying to develop a rapport with new crew chief Dan Stillman. When he climbed out of the car, an excited Edwards went straight for his cell phone to text three-time defending Cup champion Jimmie Johnson.

"Man, we ought to rent this place. Get some cars and just come out here and race. It's fun," Edwards typed in the text message to Johnson.

1on1: Andy Hillenburg

Q: Any sliver of hope that NASCAR some day will return?

Hillenburg: Our business plan -- in the beginning, and it is now -- is how do we survive without NASCAR? And I have to be able to do that. But the welcome mat is out for NASCAR.

• Read the rest of the 1on1 with Hillenburg

The problem is that the drivers differ on how much they can gain from testing at Rockingham's two tracks. Johnson was among the first to test the Little Rock and said he nearly went "flying out of the place" when he misjudged one of the turns. There are only minimal walls up at the moment, with cars that run off the track supposedly guaranteed to get caught up in one of the sand traps that presently guard the perimeter.

Kyle Busch is one driver who freely admitted he doesn't like it.

"All he did was put an oval out in the middle of the parking lot and put up some concrete to make it simulate Martinsville," Busch said. "It's real, real rough and doesn't have a whole lot of grip -- so when you get there the track's fresh like after it got rained on.

"It's real slick. I don't feel like we learned anything for the whole day that we were there, and you can't until there is some rubber laid down. When it's just myself running or my teammates out there with us, we didn't get enough rubber laid down to learn anything. So it was kind of hard to factor that we made any kind of progress."

At the same time, Ingraham is quick to point out that Johnson led 339 laps and won the next race at Martinsville "after dusting off his car" following his little mishap at Little Rock. And guys keep coming back. Among those who tested there one day last week were Ricky Carmichael in a Camping World truck and Jamie McMurray in a Cup car.

As far as the Rock itself goes -- the 1.017-mile oval that was home to so many of those previous Cup races -- drivers differ on what one can learn from testing there as well.

"Testing there can translate to all the other tracks we run at. Things you learn there can make you better -- or worse -- at all the other tracks. We tested there for California," Sadler said.

"These cars and the NASCAR rules, such as they are, have you in such a tight box. You have to go through all these different packages. You can test those packages at Rockingham. We're testing there more now because there is no place else to go. Our guys are going there once or twice a week. I wish we raced there. I really do."

Edwards said he wishes they raced there, too. But he's not sure about testing there more often.

"It would be the coolest place in the world to race. The problem is it's not the greatest place to test," Edwards said. "I haven't been to the little track yet. The big track, other than being a blast, I don't think it shows you too much for any particular track that we go to.

"We went there, Dan Stillman and I, to sort of get accustomed to one another. It was really good for trying certain things and talking back and forth, but I don't know if we're going to go back to test. We talked about going back to test a little bit more there, but I think we're kind of 50-50 because I don't really think it teaches you much for anything else."

Edwards arrived on the Cup scene in 2004, after the Rock's final race had been run. That saddens him.

"Man, I wish I had gotten the chance to race there. It's perfect," he said. "It's bumpy and unique. The banking is kind of progressive. You can run into the corner and miss your line and slide up and almost hit the wall and still run a fast lap. I mean, that's fun. To me, if all the tracks were like that, it would be great."

The future

Andy Hillenburg and Robert Ingraham quickly learned the tasks of bringing a race track to life.

So what's next for the place Hillenburg now calls home? Even the owner is not sure, but he likes where the future appears to be heading. Sometimes, he said, to understand what might be looming ahead in the future, one has to look back at the past. And treasure it, respect it.

"A lot of not just drivers but crew members got their start in the sport at Rockingham," he said. "When you came into the sport, you either got sent to Rockingham or Dover for your debut. I would almost say that if you did a survey of anybody who has been around 10 years or longer, I'll bet the majority of them would say their first race was right here at Rockingham."

Hillenburg said he thinks he knows why, too.

"It was just a long day -- a 500-miler close to home. No hotel was required. It would be like, 'Yeah, we could use your help, kid. Come on.' From a driver perspective, if you could come over here and run 500 miles and stay out of the way, they'd be like, 'Yeah, you're pretty good. We'll take you to Atlanta or Michigan.'

“

We're not done with our facility yet. This is going to be a facility that, I hope, is running 360 days a year ...

”

ANDY HILLENBURG

Now Hillenburg is through chasing the all-too-elusive dreams of the driver. Even though he also owns a team competing in the Camping World Truck Series and another competing full time in the ARCA Series, he is first and foremost a track owner now. His thoughts rarely stray far from the 254-acre parcel of land that houses the newly named Rockingham Raceway Park.

He has plans to run the Allison Legacy Series both on a road course he has reopened in the infield inside the big track and on Little Rock, possibly running weekly or bi-weekly programs down the line. He wants to expand his Fast Track driver development program for kids 14 years or older "and give their parents an honest assessment of where they're at." He wants to run Legends cars and Bandolero cars at his place.

In short, he seems to want to do it all.

"We're not done with our facility yet," he said. "There are more tracks on the drawing board, for what we want to do. This is going to be a facility that, I hope, is running 360 days a year -- whether it be stock cars, sports cars, Legends, go-karts, Bandoleros, everything. I love the sport that much."

When asked, he even wistfully wonders if some day, way down the road, NASCAR might not want to return to Rockingham. He was there not only in 1991, but also when the final Cup race was run at the Rock in 2004 -- the only two times in his seven-year career as a Cup driver that he raced at the place. In 2004, he finished what he started and was still running, albeit in 34th place, when the raced ended.

And he now intends to finish what he started at the Rock in 2007.

"I think any driver, whether they ended up being Cup champion or never even made it to Cup, or whether they made it to the Indianapolis 500 or even won it, they always think they could have done a little bit better. I think that's the nature of the race car driver," Hillenburg said. "But I think my real place in the sport is not now nor was it ever necessarily driving. It's what I can do to enhance the sport. And I feel like I can -- right here."

Joe Menzer is the author of "The Great American Gamble: How the 1979 Daytona 500 Gave Birth to a NASCAR Nation." Click here to purchase.