Watkins Glen International always has been a little bit different from a NASCAR perspective. First of all, it's not the traditional oval layout. It's a 2.45-mile road course with seven tricky turns. It's also located in central New York state, far from the Southeast where stock-car racing's deepest roots were forged more than half a century ago.

Certain drivers, such as Jeff Gordon, look forward to visiting WGI every year. Then again, Gordon is a three-time winner there. He said the track is like no other visited by the Cup Series, and he's excited to be returning there to run this Sunday's 90-lap event, the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen.

"I love Watkins Glen," Gordon said. "It's a fairly easy road course for us. ... Sonoma [the only other road course currently on the Cup schedule] has a lot of corners that require finesse that you have to put into it -- whereas Watkins Glen is just the opposite. It's about being really aggressive, fast, how deep you can get into the braking zones, being on the gas hard, carrying a lot of speed. I think it makes for a great course for our cars."

Yet the place where NASCAR's top national touring series will race this weekend may be most unique in the way it became a regular stop on the circuit.

It sat defunct and abandoned in the early 1980s. Other than three earlier, somewhat forgettable trips -- in 1957 for one year, then for one race each in both 1964 and 1965 -- NASCAR didn't run there at all until 1986. And even then, there was no guarantee that it would catch on and be back.

"That [earliest race] was just part of a Northern swing that they ran at one time, and they brought back in '64 and '65," said J.J. O'Malley, who eventually would help run the track. "There was no real momentum in the Northeast to have a regular race at that time, especially on a sports-car course."

So how did it come to pass that Watkins Glen became a fixture on what is now the Cup circuit? Actually, it's quite an interesting story.

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NASCAR raced only three times at Watkins Glen -- 1957, 1964 and 1965 -- before it returned for good in 1986.

The track's savior

Talk to anyone with a sense of history of WGI and they'll identify one man, the late Jim Riesbeck, as its savior. An executive with Corning Glass Works, Riesbeck got hooked on NASCAR while entertaining friends, clients and colleagues at a string of Daytona 500 races in the early 1980s. After traveling there for the 1983 race with some other Corning executives, a story in the local newspaper caught his eye and gave him an idea.

"He saw a story in the [Daytona] News-Journal about the impact the race had on the Daytona economy," O'Malley said. "At the time, Corning had just formed Corning Enterprises to try to boost up the economy in the twin tiers of New York and Pennsylvania.

"They got to talking and someone mentioned that there was a defunct race course not too far from [company headquarters in] Corning, [N.Y.] in Watkins Glen. The day after the 500, Riesbeck met with NASCAR officials -- and later in that year, at the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte, they announced they were forming a partnership [with International Speedway Corporation] to purchase Watkins Glen."

To understand why that might have seemed a little strange at the time, it's necessary to back up a little bit.

The Glen had sat mostly idle after going bankrupt following a CART IndyCar series race in 1981, hosting only a few, small, non-spectator sports-car events. That was a dramatic fall from grace for a facility that had hosted Formula One series races from 1961 through 1980, with many of auto racing's biggest names battling each other.

"The last race [for spectators] was in 1981. In 1982 and '83, it sat fallow," O'Malley said. "There really hadn't been anything done to it from the late 1970s. The surface was in good shape. But it was the buildings and the grounds that were in need of repair."

Where others saw a once-proud facility in a sad shape of decline, Riesbeck saw opportunity. As a senior vice president with Corning Glass, he headed up the newly-chartered subsidiary called Corning Enterprises and was looking for a way to merge his love of NASCAR with his mandate to revitalize the Southern Finger Lakes region's sagging economy by creating jobs, developing new revenue streams and generating positive publicity within the surrounding community. He met with the France family, which headed up ISC as well as NASCAR, and together they developed the plan that would revive The Glen.

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Prior to drawing in NASCAR, Jim Riesbeck decided he needed to clean up the antics of the fans who had become entirely too wild during Formula One races.

Changing the attitude

This may come as a surprise to some, but one of the first items on Riesbeck's agenda was to clean up the crowd that had been coming to the earlier races at the track. He met with a number of former track officials and volunteers, including Tom Holleran -- who ran a couple local auto parts stores and also built race engines from some local teams, including the Bodine family from nearby Chemung, N.Y. Riesbeck, in fact, was a regular customer and knew Holleran well. He also respected Holleran's opinions and was anxious to hear them.

"Jim approached me one time about the possibility of Watkins being bought up and what it would take [to get it in shape to hold races again]. At that particular time, after years of running the Grand Prix, the attitude wasn't good," Holleran said. "The community didn't like the racing because of what it brought in. Monday morning after the race, [the media] used to tell how many people got arrested for drunkenness, lewdness. They were rowdies and it kind of turned off the local people. They didn't want to have much to do with the track."

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There are a lot of tracks out there that these folks could go to. Why should they come here? You've got to find a way to make them feel welcome and make them know that you appreciate them taking the time to come and visit and spend money at your facility.

”

-- TOM HOLLERAN

Imagine that. To land a NASCAR event, they first had to ensure the local community that the crowds that would be attending stock-car events would be much tamer than the former Formula One hooligans. But there was more to it than just that, and Holleran didn't pull punches with Riesbeck when he was asked about the former staff that had run the place.

"Jim and I went to dinner a couple times and talked about what it would take to change that image," Holleran said. "I told him it was people. It was the people who meet you at the gate going in, the people who answer the phones for taking reservations or for buying the tickets.

"Jim was a real smart man who wouldn't say much to you. He would just nod and then you would get a phone call the next day from somebody. What he ended up doing was contacting the state of New York, prior to hosting the NASCAR race, and we had seminars in Corning, N.Y., with the New York State Deployment Bureau. They had speakers come in and talk, and he even asked me to say a few words. I was kind of embarrassed about it, but I just told everybody the truth that I felt -- about how you meet a customer."

Holleran said his message was simple and straight to the point. But it made sense and hit home not only with Riesbeck and other Corning officials, but also with those legions of volunteers and new track personnel who wanted to make a difference.

"There are a lot of tracks out there that these folks could go to," Holleran told them. "Why should they come here? You've got to find a way to make them feel welcome and make them know that you appreciate them taking the time to come and visit and spend money at your facility."

Riesbeck, who passed away in 1993, had a soft touch with the locals, too.

"We used to have a county road that went right through the middle of the race track," Holleran said. "They would close it down on the weekends, because they didn't have a school bus running through there. But they had to keep it open during the week because they ran school buses on it through there."

That became an annoying problem very quickly after Corning teamed with ISC to buy the track.

"Jim had a number of meetings with those people [from the nearby town of Dix, N.Y.], to try to get this road closed down permanently. It was hard because they had a lot of pride and they weren't going to do it," Holleran said. "All of a sudden, all kidding aside, they ended up getting a new pole barn to put their equipment in during the wintertime -- and then just as suddenly the road got closed."

Burn, baby, burn

O'Malley said even after it was announced that Corning had partnered with ISC, it was no foregone conclusion that NASCAR was going to make a return to the track -- or that even after it did that it would return each year thereafter for more than two decades.

"I think they wanted to just see if they could get the track up and running," said O'Malley, who eventually became news director for WGI. "They weren't so sure about NASCAR fans having an interest in road-course races."

Those inside NASCAR weren't sure about the safety or feasibility of them, either.

"Some people thought the NASCAR stock car was too big, too bulky for a road course," O'Malley said. "They had Richard Childress, Junior Johnson and Bobby Allison build some smaller, scaled-down versions of a stock car. They called it the L-R car because of the left- and right-hand turns it would have to make on a road course. But when they finally saw the regular stock cars on Watkins Glen for the first time, they felt like they wouldn't need that."

There also was the lingering matter of providing better security at the events. Riesbeck developed a plan for that as well, working closely with the man he had hired as his track president, John Saunders, and local and state law enforcement officials.

"Mr. Riesbeck just had a way with people," Holleran said. "I remember him saying around the first years of the races there that we had more money in security than in purses. That was when we were running the sports car races, the Camel GT and so forth [that preceded the first NASCAR event by about two years].

"He bought a bunch of police cars that had been retired from a bunch of sheriffs' departments and took 'em up to the race track and had maintenance go through 'em. Then when the policemen would come in, they would use these police cars furnished by the race track."

After witnessing some of the carnage left behind by unruly Formula One fans in earlier years, Holleran said he was greatly impressed with the approach taken by the security forces put together by Riesbeck and Saunders.

"At some of the last Grand Prix races, folks would just drink all day long and then either pass out or look for something to burn," Holleran said. "That's all it was all weekend long, a big party. They had to change that image somehow to even get NASCAR to come in.

"With Mr. Riesbeck up here, and John Saunders, they got it all under control. John was the first person he put in there to take care of the track. I think Jim promised the Corning people that he would look out for their interests and they would not embarrass them, that they would put an end to the burning of the buses and all the public drunkenness and everything else. He didn't want anybody to make a scene and he didn't want anything to make the newspapers. He did a great job of straightening it up. He took the focus back to racing instead of having it on all the other stuff."

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Watkins Glen allows cars to carry more speed into the turns, and that has helped the track earn some fans among the Cup drivers.

Here to stay

It wasn't long after that before NASCAR finally made its much-anticipated return to Watkins Glen after a 21-year absence. Holleran, who would end up working as a volunteer in Victory Lane for more than 20 years, was there.

"They ended up reconfiguring it and cleaning it up, and getting rid of the image of that it had with the old Grand Prix," Holleran said. "[Riesbeck] kept working to get the facility back in shape and updated so that it would accommodate the amount of people it would need to -- and then he finally sat down again with the people in Daytona.

"At that particular time, I remember the Allison brothers were involved with the late Bill France on building an L-R car. And when that came about, Jim had spoken to the Frances -- and it seemed like a fresh approach. That's how Watkins got the NASCAR people to sit down and talk with them. From there, they secured the race and staged a comeback, you might say."

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I think some people might have treated it just as an experiment. But we went into it treating it like it would be a long-term event with a lot of interest.

”

-- J.J. O'MALLEY

It's not like there weren't problems, or criticism. Even with the continuing improvements, the facility was long considered one of the most outdated in terms of many amenities -- including accommodations for the press who would write about it or talk about it, often critically. It wasn't until recently, long after ISC bought out Corning in 1997, that many major infrastructure issues were addressed.

But from that first return race on Aug. 9, 1986 -- which was won by Tim Richmond in dramatic fashion -- there was one undeniable fact. The fans were there in full force. It was an endorsement for NASCAR in the Northeast, for road racing, and for Watkins Glen International.

"There was a lot of interest, a lot of grass-roots interest that surprised many of the executives in the sport. It was an immediate hit," O'Malley said. "I think some people might have treated it just as an experiment. But we went into it treating it like it would be a long-term event with a lot of interest."

There were some signs prior to the event signaling it was going to be a success, according to O'Malley.

"I remember [driver] Benny Parsons came in early for a small test session, and he went to a restaurant [in the area]. And people were coming up to him and saying, 'Hey, Mr. Parsons.' He later told me he didn't expect to be recognized. That was one sign that the fans were pretty big on NASCAR," O'Malley said.

"There was a huge Bodine contingent, of course, but there were also a lot of [Dale] Earnhardt fans and Richard Petty fans. They were very NASCAR-savvy."

Pretty soon, O'Malley said the staff gained confidence that the race was going to be such a huge success that they would be able to build on it for the long-term future.

"I thought it was going to be pretty big -- bigger than anything we had," O'Malley said. "There was some thought that it might be comparable to the Camel GT, which was our biggest event at the time. And this tripled it in terms of size.

"Right off the bat, the day we opened for testing, we had our biggest crowd. We had people waiting to get in. And this was a week before the race."

The actual crowd count for the race won by Richmond was 88,068. Supporters such as O'Malley and Holleran, who had felt all along that a NASCAR road course could work in a place where many others believed it couldn't, felt vindicated.

"I kind of felt all along that this would happen -- that the market was there, the fans were there, and that the race track was definitely there," O'Malley said. "It was the perfect spot for it."

As for the rowdy crowds that had previously haunted the track? They were no more. Or at least the few rowdies who snuck onto the premises were left with two choices -- behave or be asked to leave.

"It was a huge, huge crowd. It was, truthfully, a lot better than I thought it was going to be -- because how do you manage that many people on a hot day?" Holleran said. "Everybody wants to drink a beer, and that's OK. You just don't want them to drink eight or ten of 'em, because after that they get rowdy. So it was a little bit of a challenge at first -- but they wouldn't back down at the race track.

"They never roughed anybody up. But they did it in such a manner that everything stayed out of the newspapers. If someone got rowdy, they just walked them out to the gate. They'd take their tickets away and tell them, 'You're outta here.' And that's all there was to it."

The fans and NASCAR have been coming back to Watkins Glen International ever since.