The wild history of the Bowman Gray "Madhouse"

Welcome to Bowman Gray Stadium, a.k.a. the Madhouse, the new home of The Clash, NASCAR’s preseason tune-up. Drivers will need to leave their racing etiquette and good manners at the door, because there’s no place for either on this short, rowdy track — one that hasn’t seen a Cup race in more than half a century. It’s the motorsports equivalent of a Mad Max film, and this fury road takes no prisoners.

Add in the Clash’s one-weekend-only format — a Saturday full of qualifying and heat races leading into Sunday’s main event — and you’ve got a recipe for chaos. But it’ll be chaos taking place on hallowed ground, with a history that makes the action all the more spectacular.

And it all starts with a Mozart concert.

The birth of Bowman Gray Stadium

Bowman Gray was never intended to be the home of a quarter-mile race track. It was built in 1937, deep in the Great Depression, and named for a recently deceased R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company executive (welcome to North Carolina). Football was the stadium’s main purpose, along with boxing matches and classical music performances; it was christened with a local Mozart club concert.

Wolfgang’s Lacrimosa as the soundtrack to rumbling race cars feels like a perfect match, but auto racing didn’t truly come to Bowman Gray until 1947, , when an asphalt track was laid around the outskirts of the football field. The promoter involed skipped town, leaving Winston-Salem holding the bill.

That’s when NASCAR founders Bill France Sr. and Alvin Hawkins stepped in. France was skeptical of the project, but Hawkins wouldn’t let up. Bowman Gray began holding weekly races, and by 1958, NASCAR Cup Series arrived. The stadium stayed on the Cup schedule for the next 13 years, with Bobby Allison winning the 29th and final race — even if it took 53 years to officially credit him with the victory.

Earning the title of racing’s “Madhouse”

NASCAR may have left after 1971, but that doesn’t mean the track at Bowman Gray grew weeds. Regional NASCAR and plenty of other divisions have turned laps in the ensuing decades — and learned that the quarter-mile oval has a special penchant for calamity.

Maybe it’s the cramped confines. Maybe it’s the grassroots atmosphere. Maybe it’s the types of drivers that Bowman Gray brings in, willing to wrestle for glory and little else. But pretty quickly, the stadium became known as the Madhouse, and the name’s stuck.

Bobby Allison Memorial Trophy

Photo by: NASCAR Media

The grassy infield tends to host impromptu demolition derbies, as pissed-off drivers chase each other across the track. Race winners have been punched in the gut by furious fans while attempting to collect the winner’s trophy. An angry driver once clung to the side of a rival’s car while being dragged around the track. One person chucked a full bucket of speedy dry, landing a direct hit on a pace car. These days, the chaos goes viral on social media.

The police are always on standby, and tend to stay busy. The Madhouse exists outside of time — and stays loved because of it.

What NASCAR drivers are in for

NASCAR’s reunion with Bowman Gray means the track wears some upgrades for the Clash: soft walls, modern lighting, a carefully landscaped lawn. But it’s still the same Madhouse underneath the nice clothes.

It’s also new to many of the polished stars of the Cup Series, who might not be ready for what’s to come when the heat races start on Saturday. There’s no room for error, and nowhere to hide (on track or off). The straightaways are over in a blink, and a lap takes less than 15 seconds. Making contact tends to be the fastest path to making up positions on the one-groove flat track — and there’s no escape, with a constant stream of traffic around every corner of the .25-mile speedway.

Kyle Larson, Hendrick Motorsports, Chevrolet Camaro, Bubba Wallace, 23XI Racing, Toyota Camry, fight

Photo by: Ben Earp / NKP / Motorsport Images

Tempers flare fast as the drivers go feral. The Clash may just be an exhibition race, but it won’t feel that way to drivers battling for a shot at Sunday main event.

Critics like to complain that Bowman Gray is unrefined and uncultured; a home for risk-takers and roughnecks who want to beat the other guy, without much care for how.

But the Madhouse is a still-living monument to the early days of NASCAR — like seeing an alligator and realizing that it spent time in the swamp with dinosaurs. Legends of the sport were forged inside its weathered walls. Spectators became die-hard fans — and more. Hall of Fame NASCAR owner Richard Childress sold peanuts in the grandstands as a little kid.

Compared to the last three years of the Clash, hosted in Los Angeles, this weekend’s race at Bowman Gray will feel like a bizarro world. There won’t be some megastar hosting a halftime concert, but there will almost certain be one hell of a show for the sold-out crowd. Hopefully someone plays a little Mozart, though.