iRacing is gearing up for the release of a very special track, the North Wilkesboro Speedway, one of NASACR’s most legendary venues.
Located in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, the speedway is a 0.625 mile short track that was immensely popular with NASCAR fans and drivers alike. Racing on the speedway stopped in 1996 as NASCAR abandoned the track in favor of bigger, more modern venues that offer more amenities and more profitable markets.
The abandoned track fell into disarray over the years and while some fans never stopped hoping that NASCAR might return one day, the next best thing is happening now as iRacing’s introducing a virtual version of the historic venue with help from NASCAR fan favorite Dale Earnhardt Jr.
While creating a virtual version of a race track is common work in the sim racing industry these days, this project needed a bit more unusual craft as the abandoned venue actually needed to be cleaned up before the track could be scanned. Thankfully, this unique task has been documented by a neat little documentary you can watch above, showing how the iRacing team and Dale Jr. get the track ready to be scanned and collect reference data around the abandoned venue.
This is as much as a sim racing feel-good story as you’ll ever see , showing how sims can help preserve a piece of motorsports history that had no chance of survival in the real world.
