Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Bowman Gray Stadium will host the season-opening Clash exhibition race in 2025, NASCAR executive vice president Ben Kennedy announced Saturday at the track. The race will air on FOX on February 2nd.
Though a new venue, it will be a familiar style of racing for The Clash. Like the temporary track built at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum where the Clash has been held for the past three years, Bowman Gray Stadium is a quarter-mile bullring that always creates tight battles, plenty of wrecks, and sky-high tempers in every race in puts on.
Unlike the Coliseum, though, Bowman Gray is part of NASCAR’s earliest history and helped shaped the fabric of the sport. The track was built in 1937 and played host to NASCAR’s first paved races. All-in-all, it hosted 29 races at the Cup Series level until 1971, including being the site of Richard Petty’s 100th win in 1969.
NASCAR’s first weekly racetrack, it remains the sport’s longest-running weekly track, the site of Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series races that consistently sell out and create viral moments online as cars wreck spectacularly and tempers boil over.
“Bowman Gray Stadium has a storied history in motorsports, so we look forward to bringing the Cup Series back to this revered racetrack for the first time since 1971,” said Kennedy. “As NASCAR’s first weekly racetrack, Bowman Gray Stadium holds a special place as the original home to grassroots racing. With a history of intense competition, we are proud to host The Clash at the ‘The Madhouse.'”
The facility, an asphalt track built around a football field that hosts the Winston-Salem State University team during the season, currently has a capacity of 17,000. The seats were added in the 1950s and the facility is aged. NASCAR’s press release did not specifically indicate that any upgrades to the facility would be made before the event. That also includes potential safety concerns – with no pit road atop the football field, pits are accessed through an opening directly in the Turn 3 wall.
However, the city has invested in the track, with millions of dollars provided for upgrades in recent years. Winston-Salem is in the middle of NASCAR country, in the North Carolina and Virginia region where many of the sport’s founding drivers got the itch to go fast while running moonshine. Since those days, the city has always been connected to the sport.
“The city of Winston-Salem is very excited and grateful to NASCAR for selecting Bowman Gray Stadium as the site for The Clash in 2025,” said Mayor Allen Joines. “This further solidifies our city’s relationship with NASCAR and the many fans in the region as we welcome the NASCAR Cup Series back to Bowman Gray Stadium.”
The track is also more familiar to much of the Cup grid. Alex Bowman, William Byron, Chase Elliott, Justin Haley, Corey Lajoie, Kyle Larson, Ryan Preece, Daniel Suarez, and Bubba Wallace have all competed at the facility in some series, especially in ARCA East when that tour stopped at Bowman Gray from 2011 until 2015.
Another notable name to have raced at the track: Ben Kennedy himself, a former racer before becoming an executive in the sport. He won an ARCA East race at the track and knows it well.
The announcement marks a sea change in NASCAR’s approach to The Clash. Instead of heading to Los Angeles to pursue new fans from a demographic that largely doesn’t follow the sport, NASCAR is bringing its season opener home to its core fanbase in the heartland of the sport.
The Clash has changed venues multiple times in recent years after being held on the high banks at Daytona from its inception in 1979 up until 2020. In 2021, it was put on the Daytona Road Course before moving to the Coliseum in 2021. Time will tell if this next change becomes more permanent.
