This weekend’s Cup race in Chicago (5:30 p.m. ET Sunday on NBC and Peacock) brings NASCAR full circle to its founding 75 years ago with a return to street course racing. NASCAR’s 1949 inaugural season consisted of eight races: seven ovals of a mile or less — and a street course.
Sure, part of the Daytona Beach course was sand, but the course did include the same streets locals traversed in their cars. Seventy-five years later, the Cup schedule includes eight types of courses — the most diverse group of tracks the series has ever run.
That fact piqued my curiosity about how the schedule has evolved over the years.
One note about the numbers: NASCAR counted the Duels — the qualifying races for the Daytona 500 — as regular-season races from 1959-71. To ensure consistency, I don’t include any of the Duels in my analysis. That’s why you’ll find, for example, 62 races in most accounts of the 1964 season, but only 60 races here.
A track taxonomy
People often disagree on track nomenclature: Bristol is a short track. But what about Phoenix? Or Dover? I divided the tracks into the following groups:
- Tracks less than a mile, such as Martinsville, Richmond and Bristol.
- Tracks between 1 and 1.49 miles, like Phoenix, Dover and Nashville.
- Intermediate tracks are the 1.5-mile ovals like Charlotte and Las Vegas.
- ‘Other’ includes any oval larger than 1.5 miles that isn’t a superspeedway. This group includes Michigan, Pocono and the Indy oval.
- Superspeedways include Daytona and Talladega, plus Atlanta from 2022 on.
- Any non-oval track used only for racing is a road course.
- Dirt is reserved for Bristol when it’s covered in dirt.
- Street courses are races run at least partially on a public roadway.
Don’t let the narrowness of my ‘dirt’ category suggest that running stock cars on dirt is new. All seven of the 1949 oval races were run on dirt, as were most of NASCAR’s early seasons. But in the 2020s, dirt is a novelty and deserves its own class.
I analyzed each season according to the tracks run, color coded the track types and produced the graph below. You can find a larger version of the graph here.
The first thing that jumps out is the difference between pre-1972 and the years since. Before the 1972 season starting, Bill France Jr. inherited stewardship of NASCAR from his father, Bill France Sr. That transition marks the start of what is considered NASCAR’s modern era.
The younger France pared down the schedule, making it shorter and more consistent from year to year. In fact, those first modern-era schedules don’t look all that much different from recent years’ schedules.
The early days
The first NASCAR season included five ovals less than a mile (62.5% of the season), two 1-mile tracks (25.0%) and the Daytona Beach & Street course (12.5%).
Although most of the tracks run that first year are gone, Martinsville and North Wilkesboro appear on the 2023 schedule. Martinsville has been a mainstay track, while North Wilkesboro only recently returned as the site for this year’s All Star Race.
The number of races in a season varied during the first decades, but NASCAR kept adding new tracks and new track types.
The first track over a mile appeared in 1950. Darlington was then listed as a 1.250-mile oval.
The Cup Series also ran its first road course in 1954 at the Linden airport. Al Keller won that race driving a Jaguar.
The Daytona Beach course hosted its last race in 1958. The following year, the series moved to the brand-new 2.5-mile superspeedway in Daytona.
The 1960s
The 1960 season introduced the first of what we now think of when we think of 1.5-mile tracks at Atlanta and Charlotte. But tracks shorter than 1 mile dominated the schedule.
In 1962, sub-1-mile tracks comprised the largest percentage of the schedule ever: 84.3%. They accounted for 43 tracks out of 51 total races for the season.
Drivers raced at 48 tracks shorter than 1 mile in the 60-race 1964 season. That’s equivalent to 1.33 current seasons, but all run at places like Martinsville, Bristol and Richmond.
Michigan debuted in 1969. It was the first ‘other’ type of track: a 2-mile oval that didn’t depend on drafting as much as superspeedways. A 2-mile track at College Station, Texas also made the schedule.
The debut of Talladega Superspeedway that same year brought the total number of superspeedway races to 3 out of 52 or 5.8% of the schedule. Today, superspeedways make up 16.7% of the season.
The modern era
When the total number of races in a season dropped in 1972, so did the percentage of short tracks. In 1971, 54.3% of the season was run on tracks less than 1 mile. In 1972, that number dropped to 9% of the total. In 2023, tracks shorter than 1 mile comprise 13.9% of the schedule, while tracks between 1 and 1.5 miles make up another 22.2%. Tracks under a mile-and-a-half are now 36.1% of the schedule.
The building of intermediate tracks in the late 1990s drove the next major schedule evolution. Texas held its first race in 1997, Las Vegas in 1998 and Homestead in 1999. Chicago and Kansas followed in 2001. The last new mile-and-a-half was Kentucky, which held its first race in 2011, but hasn’t appeared on the schedule since 2020.
Between 2011=20, 11 intermediate tracks appeared on the 36-race schedule, making 30.6% of the season. This year, only seven intermediate tracks (19.4%) are on the schedule.
The most recent schedule trend is the rise of road courses. The Cup Series used to have two per year, but in 2021 — partially due to the pandemic rescheduling —drivers navigated seven road courses or 19.4% of the season.
This weekend marks a return to the tradition established at the start of NASCAR history. There is again a street course on the schedule. It’s just one, but it’s never been more than one.
Hopefully, there’s no sand involved this time around.