NASCAR Hall of Fame may prove well worth the wait

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- One day there will be interactive displays and video screens and cabinets full of memorabilia, but on this night four months before the official opening, there are still dangling wires and workers scurrying to get the job done. With its bare white walls and unfinished touches, the interior of the NASCAR Hall of Fame still looks very much like a construction site, to the point where visitors are required to wear hard hats, orange vests, and protective glasses.

The first class

Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, Bill France Jr., Junior Johnson and Bill France Sr. will be enshrined in May 2010.

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On May 11, though, this will seem like a different world. Soon race cars will adorn a spiraled, progressive banking that right now is made of plywood. Soon exhibits dedicated to the first five inductees will sit atop platforms that now stand empty. Soon visitors will be able to sit in a 275-person theatre featuring a curved projection screen and built-in air vents that allow for a sensory experience, even though the seats have yet to be installed. For a facility scheduled to open to the world in only a few months, the NASCAR Hall of Fame seems startlingly empty. But you can see the promise, through even all the plaster and the paint.

"We're looking forward to getting her open. She's not a sonogram anymore. She's almost a baby," said Buz McKim, the Hall's historian in residence, and the man tasked with tracking down many of the relics that will soon give the place life. And rest assured, regardless of how it looks today, it's going to be completed on time -- crews are working around the clock to finish it, and many exhibits are being assembled off-site, and will simply be snapped into place. Even so, the facility will open late. Years late. Decades late. Because in retrospect, it seems astounding that this idea has not come to fruition before now.

People have tried. There are a hundred roadside museums like Memory Lane and the North Carolina Auto Racing Hall of Fame up in Mooresville, N.C., charming places well worth their modest admission price. There are more polished halls of fame at Talladega and Darlington, and even a few stock cars in the museum at Indianapolis. But those facilities have only been filling a vacuum. NASCAR has long lacked its own signature hall, a showpiece exhibit as fundamentally connected with stock-car racing as Canton is to football, as Springfield is to basketball, as Cooperstown is to baseball. (Continued)