A group of race-industry veterans has signed a 3-year lease of the North Wilkesboro Speedway with an exclusive option to buy the track, according to principals in the deal.
Racing will return, with the USARacing Pro Cup Championship Series coming to North Wilkesboro Speedway on Oct. 3, 2010. The USARacing's schedule for next season, with the date in North Wilkesboro, was announced in a drivers' meeting at the current season's last race Saturday night in South Boston, Va.
Speedway Associates Inc. has been working quietly on the deal for the past three years, said the group's president, Alton McBride Jr. of Lake Norman. The group includes his father, Alton McBride Sr., as well as Dave Ehret, John Burwell and Bosco Lowe. Most have been involved in short-track racing both behind the wheel and in business.
"We're in this for the right reasons," Alton McBride Jr. said. "We're in this because our life is motorsports."
Bruton Smith, the billionaire owner of North Wilkesboro Speedway, has said a number of times that he would take $12 million for the track, which closed in 1996.
McBride said that a confidentiality agreement won't allow him to talk about the terms of this deal.
The principals had not planned to make an announcement yet, but when the new USARacing schedule was released Saturday and included North Wilkesboro, word started spreading fast. McBride said they will announce more detailed plans within the next couple of weeks.
"We're not relying solely on racing," he said. "We're looking at a multi-use facility where it's with the people, for the people and about the people. It all comes back to the people. The people have been left out of short-track racing nationwide."
Terri Parsons, the widow of the late NASCAR champion Benny Parsons, doesn't have a financial stake in the new group, but she worked behind the scenes to help make the deal happen.
"This is just good clean-cut racing the way it used to be for all the right reasons," she said. "We're into the preservation of history and that's what we're all about. I think Benny would be proud of them."
She invited USARacing's managing partner, Larry Camp, to a moonshiners and revenuers reunion she held several weeks ago and told him she wanted him to talk to Alton McBride Jr.
Camp told them he had a Pro Cup date he wanted to run at North Wilkesboro.
"We are extremely pleased to be the first national touring racing series to return to the true roots of stock car racing," Camp said in a statement. "We know the people of Wilkes County and the surrounding area of North Carolina have missed stock car racing on this storied track."
County officials have said in past months that they had a serious group of investors looking to buy the track. They worried that another short-term leaseholder's disastrous turn would derail the ongoing efforts.
Charles Collins Jr., who is not connected to this current effort, had a short-term lease and announced plans for a women-only reality driving show. He was arrested earlier this year and charged with multiple felonies linked to financial problems.
He's in the Wilkes County Jail, and has a court date next Monday in Wilkes District Court.
mmitchell@wsjournal.com
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