LOUDON, N.H. -- At first, not even Bill France Jr. was convinced. And why should he be? Here was a board-flat race track built on the site of an old motorcycle course, nestled deep in the woods of a small, rural state, rising from a two-lane highway that passed through Shaker villages and over dirt roads. The man who built the speedway, Bob Bahre, often asked the former NASCAR chairman about his odds of eventually receiving a Cup Series date. The answer was always the same.

"Your chances," France would tell him, "are slim and none."

And yet here were are, surrounded by 93,521 grandstand seats, at a facility that until this current economic recession was as sure a sellout as there was in NASCAR. The fact that New Hampshire Motor Speedway succeeded -- heck, the fact that it was even built in the first place -- stands as something of a testament to the fervor for auto racing in a part of the world that's been breeding modified fans and drivers for decades. But 20 years ago, before the then-Busch Series came to the Granite State for the first time, there was a natural degree of apprehension. People in the South wondered, why is NASCAR going up there? People in New England wondered, why is NASCAR coming up here?

Drivers wondered, how exactly do you find this place?

"When we came up to New Hampshire and I pulled in here, I thought, where in the world are we going? I thought, are we going to Lake Winnipesaukee?" recalled Kenny Wallace, who placed 24th in that first NASCAR event in New Hampshire, a 1990 race won by Tommy Ellis. "We're going down this little two-lane road in front of the race track, and it reminded me a lot of going to [North] Wilkesboro, going past the chicken coops. And low and behold, here's a race track that seats 100,000 people. It was a lost soul for a little bit, before it became so popular. It is true, if you build it, they will come. That's what happened here."

France may have had his doubts, and drivers coming up to New Hampshire for the first time could have indeed used a GPS to find the place, but to many in the industry, there was never any question the little track in Loudon would be a huge hit. NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter knew from his days running Darlington Raceway that the Southern 500 attracted more spectators from New England than almost any other region of the country. Former driver Brett Bodine knew from his days racing modifieds that the area was just waiting to be tapped.

"I moved to New England in the early '80s to further my career, because particularly at that time, if you wanted to race modifieds, this was the part of the country to do it in," said Bodine, a native of Chemung, N.Y., who now serves as NASCAR's director of cost research. "That's why I came to [tracks like] Stafford and Thompson and Riverside Park. This is where the competition was, the biggest crowds, the best following of modifieds was in the Northeast. And I knew if those folks ever got a taste of Cup racing, what it would mean. The ultimate success story is this race track being here in New Hampshire."

“

I think maybe the thing that threw people off a little was just NASCAR stock-car racing in the Northeast. This has always been a huge group of racing fans up in the Northeast.

”

-- JEFF GORDON

A foundation was already in place. NASCAR's modified tour -- which has its strongest foothold in the Northeast, and competes as an undercard to the Sprint Cup circuit only in New Hampshire -- is the sport's oldest division. Before he razed the old Bryar Motorsports Park to build his Granite State race track, Bahre promoted an annual late model event at Maine's Oxford Plains Speedway that attracted sellout crowds and the occasional NASCAR star. Richard Petty won one of the three premier-division events held on that same .333-mile paved oval in the 1960s, and knew the fans were there. The King wasn't surprised when the Cup tour played to a full house in its first visit to New Hampshire in 1993.

"When we came up here for this particular race, we'd already come up here before," Petty said. "We went to Oxford, Maine, in the '60s. So we've run all over this territory. And in seeing and talking to fans, there were fans everywhere up here. They'd wander out of Canada, wander off the islands and stuff, there were just a lot of fans here. When Bob and them built the race track, they knew there were fans here. You build it, they will come. They knew that. So we knew we would get a very good reception with the Cup Series being here, because it was the first time we'd had a big, big race up here."

Even so, a Cup date was far from guaranteed; in fact, Bahre built the track without any assurances that he'd ever get one. Requests to France were answered with the same "slim to none" refrain. Bahre had to be satisfied with a pair of events in the then-Busch series, which attracted crowds larger than most expected. Jeff Gordon, who had done some developmental-circuit racing in the Northeast prior to his NASCAR days, wasn't surprised.

"I think maybe the thing that threw people off a little was just NASCAR stock-car racing in the Northeast," he said. "This has always been a huge group of racing fans up in the Northeast. I raced up here briefly long before I ever went down South to get involved with NASCAR. I was driving a midget, a super modified, and saw the different tracks and the competition and a huge fan base for local racing. I wasn't that surprised. You put a flat one-mile oval track near Loudon, N.H., I wasn't sure how big it could be. After the first [Busch] race that I ran here and saw the grandstand filled up, I knew the Cup Series would do very well here."

But for the time being, "slim and none" continued to ring in Bahre's ears. The track hosted two Busch events again in 1991, and two more in 1992, each of them accompanied by the usual array of modified and late model support races. Brian France, spearheading the effort to make NASCAR a more national series, eventually came up to visit. He left impressed, and next time brought his father up with him. Bill Jr. was impressed, too. At last, he telephoned Bahre to tell him that New Hampshire would receive a Cup date for 1993. Bahre, unassuming as always, dryly acted as if the caller had reached the wrong number.

"Bob Bahre knew this was a hotbed," Hunter said. "To people in the South, it might have been kind of a shock. But we knew. I knew, based on what the Southern 500 had been, that this is a hotbed of NASCAR fans. You know, they talk about good ol' boys, or whatever? For the Northern good ol' boys -- hunters, farmers, etc., people who worked with their hands -- it was a hotbed. There were plenty of fans."

Rusty Wallace won that race before the first in a long line of sellout crowds. Traffic tie-ups preceding the inaugural Cup race prompted the state of New Hampshire to widen a highway before the next year's event. Hunter remembers attending grand marshal dinners and meeting dignitaries like John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff, and former Maine senator George Mitchell. To little New Hampshire, which lives in Boston's considerable shadow, hosting the largest sporting event in all of New England was a very big deal.

Of course, there were trials. Bahre secured a second Cup weekend only after buying out the family that had owned half of North Wilkesboro Speedway, which closed in 1996. The deaths of drivers Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin months apart in 2000 led many to question the safety of the facility, which has since been bolstered with a soft-wall system. In 2007, Bahre sold the track to Bruton Smith's Speedway Motorsports Inc. empire for the tidy sum of $340 million. Through it all, the fans continued to turn out.

"I knew how dedicated race fans in this area were," Bodine said. "I lived it, all through the '80s. People don't realize how many race tracks there are in the New England states."

Bodine, standing under a tent in the Sprint Cup garage, is interrupted by a man who approaches with an outstretched hand. "I used to see you drive at Stafford," says the stranger, referring to Stafford Speedway, a legendary modified track in Stafford Springs, Conn. The encounter leaves the NASCAR executive with a broad smile.

"There's one of those race fans, right there," he says. One of the many that New Hampshire Motor Speedway was built upon.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.