WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — In what surreal, alternate reality does former Cup Series champion Kyle Larson race alongside 12-time track champ Tim Brown at Bowman Gray Stadium? In what dream state would brothers Austin and Ty Dillon race bumper-to-bumper at the same arena where their grandfather, Richard Childress, famously sold popcorn and peanuts from the grandstands as a youth? And where else would fans jam in to fill 30 sections of bleachers for practice?
The mythical “Madhouse” is the very real answer, as NASCAR’s top division held official on-track sessions at Bowman Gray Stadium for the first time since the dog days of August 1971. Saturday evening’s preliminaries were a tantalizing preview on the eve of a full-fledged return in Sunday’s Cook Out Clash (8 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), the non-points season opener that’s making its eagerly awaited debut at the quarter-mile track.
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Fans cheered the brimming sense of nostalgia as Cup Series cars rolled back onto the historic track shortly after the stroke of 6 o’clock. More history is yet to be made.
“It’s really special,” said Richard Childress Racing’s Austin Dillon, whose Welcome, North Carolina, hometown is just 15 miles south. “I remember leaving Truck (Series) races on Friday night, flying home and excited about coming to Bowman Gray on a Saturday night, sit in the beer garden and watch the wrecks — and the race that happens around the wrecks.”
And then there’s that. The lore that’s existed for decades around Bowman Gray — the fights, the carnage, the preadolescents giving drivers middle-finger salutes that somehow qualify as a family activity — is getting an elevated profile from the local/regional/weekly level to the national spotlight. That tradition popped up early Saturday with a first-lap crash in the Modified Division Madhouse Classic event that prompted that driver-to-driver gesture by mid-afternoon. It continued with a slam-bang vibe in the Cup Series’ qualifying heats later Saturday evening.
That passion from those confrontations has typically been heated through the years, but the pre-race chatter about those time-worn Madhouse customs has come with a wink and a nod.
“No, we already met in the NASCAR trailer, and they already gave us the list of who’s supposed to fight with who,” cracked Kyle Busch, who scrapped with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in the most recent non-points Cup event — the 2024 All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway. “So yeah, that’s already done. I can’t disclose names, so just wait and see.”
The crew chiefs will be fighting some of their own unknowns. The Clash has been held for the last three years at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the temporary quarter-mile track was roughly modeled on Bowman Gray’s configuration. The differences lay in the lack of an infield wall, the unique contours that border the horseshoe-shaped seating area, and the smaller, more intimate setting.
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A couple of weeks back, crew chief Paul Wolfe told his driver, Joey Logano: “Hey, let’s take a ride up there one day for a little field trip.” With two engineers from the No. 22 Team Penske Ford crew, that road trip included a stop for lunch and an informal walk around the track.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of similarities to LA, sure. It’s not drastically different from a track layout standpoint,” Wolfe said. “Yeah, it’ll be exciting. How the racing plays out, you have this small strip of what you’d call a curb or whatever, then into the grass. At least at LA, there was like an inside wall. Where here it’s just, I don’t know if it’s just free game, so it could get interesting. It was cool, though. I mean, I’m excited to go do it. I like change, and I think we’ve had a lot of that, and continue to do it. It definitely keeps things exciting, keeps you on your toes.”
Local media outlets have celebrated the return of NASCAR’s top series to Winston-Salem with wall-to-wall coverage and reporters marveling — privately and publicly — about Bowman Gray’s next-level sprucing up. Fresh paint, new lighting and just-installed SAFER barriers have done plenty to modernize the facility that’s been here since the Depression Era, but bringing the stadium up to code has been done with care, faithfully keeping the character and old-school feel intact.
A recent Cup Series revival at North Wilkesboro was done with similar mindfulness. But as Busch noted, the capital improvements aren’t just a premier-series phenomenon.
“The fact of us going somewhere to reinvest into the future for other racing, the local-level racers, to be able to see a better venue to be able to go enjoy and bring their sponsors and have fun and race and compete is only going to benefit from the top,” Busch says. “So bringing that down here to Bowman Gray, seeing the upgrades here, looking at other tracks around the country that we could do some of the same stuff.”
Busch noted grassroots tracks in Alabama and Florida that might benefit from a similar treatment. “So that could be a really cool thing down the road, that this continues to kind of float around,” he said. “Now return on investment? I don’t know, but I think the return on investment is the younger generations and the younger racers that want to be somebody (can) get to race at a cool place, and then can move up the ladder and someday, one day, go back and race at their home track as a pro.”