NASCAR Tickets

The 2009 season brings some changes to NASCAR: the Craftsman Truck Series is now known as the Camping World Truck Series and the Sprint Cup series schedule has been realigned to add the Pepsi 500 at Auto Club Speedway to the Chase for the Cup, the AMP Energy 500 at Talladega Superspeedway to later in the Fall and Atlanta Motor Speedway’s Pep Boys Auto 500 to Labor Day weekend as a night race. These changes promise to make this already thrilling sport even better, and demand for tickets is higher than ever.

It’s no surprise that NASCAR is one of the most popular sports in the United States. Unlike other sports, one doesn’t have to be born with extraordinary physical prowess to compete. NASCAR drivers are regular guys who worked their butts off and made it big, and that inspires unparalleled loyalty in fans. That’s just what founder Bill France, Sr. had in mind when he started NASCAR. He thought that racing shouldn’t be exclusive to the very wealthy who could afford wildly expensive race cars. Why not let the average Joe race “stock” cars (i.e. cars that anyone can purchase from a car dealer)? With that idea in mind France started NASCAR in 1948, and though there have been quite a few changes since the early days, the idea of racing for the masses is still at the heart of it all.

The NASCAR of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s was very different than what we’re used to today. Back then, safety was more of an afterthought than a priority. There were no roll bars, windows had glass in them, and the drivers often didn’t bother to buckle their seat belts! Clearly making NASCAR racing safer was a great thing, but when in 1952 the cars started using specialized “high performance” tires, because they promoted safety, it opened up the flood gates for the partnership between manufacturers and NASCAR that we have today. Though some may have lamented the loss of the pure stock car ethos, many more have been able to enjoy the races live, as the racetracks evolved with the cars. NASCAR races used to be held on dirt tracks, but as the popularity of the sport grew, professional racetracks started to pop up and in Darlington, South Carolina in 1950, the first superspeedway was built. In 1959 the Daytona International Speedway was opened, and it immediately became the preeminent track in stock car racing, a title it still holds today.

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