Bowman Gray Stadium, Oval

Bowman Gray Stadium is a quarter-mile, flat asphalt oval set inside a football stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The stadium opened in 1938 and the racing oval encircles a grass gridiron field still used by Winston-Salem State University, an unusual stadium-short-track combination. NASCAR began sanctioning weekly racing here in 1949, making Bowman Gray the organisation's oldest continuously operating weekly race track and the first paved oval on which NASCAR ever competed. Its tight quarter-mile confines and rough-and-tumble racing earned it the enduring nickname 'The Madhouse', with on-track contact and driver confrontations part of its folklore. The track runs a weekly NASCAR program across four local divisions: modified, sportsman, street stock and stadium stock, with the modifieds, NASCAR's first sanctioned division, as the headline class since 1949. For decades the venue operated under a long-running lease held by the Hawkins family's Winston-Salem Speedway, until NASCAR itself took over racing operations in 2024. That move paved the way for NASCAR's top tier to return in 2025, when the season-opening exhibition Cook Out Clash was held at the stadium, its first Cup-level event in more than fifty years. The flat, four-turn layout rewards momentum and close-quarters racecraft over outright horsepower.

Operated by: City of Winston-Salem / Wake Forest University