Martinsville Speedway is an International Speedway Corporation]-owned NASCAR stock car racing track located in
Ridgeway, Virginia]. At 0.526 miles in length, it is the shortest track in the NASCAR Cup Series. The track was also one of the first paved "superspeedways" in NASCAR, being built in 1947 by H. Clay Earles. The track is often referred to as paper clip-shaped and is banked only 12° in the turns. The combination of long straightaways and flat, narrow turns makes hard braking going into turns and smooth acceleration exiting turns a must.
Martinsville Speedway as seen from turn 2
The track ownership was a joint venture of brothers Jim and Bill France, Jr., and H. Clay Earles, the majority owner, along with daughters Dorothy Campbell and Mary Weatherford, and Dorothy Campbell's children, Sarah Fain, and Clay Campbell.
Winners of Martinsville's Sprint Cup and Whelen Modified Tour events receive a Long-case_clock long-case clock as a trophy instead of a regular trophy, a tip of the cap to the fame of the Martinsville furniture industry. One of the neat things one can see while watching a NASCAR race is a Norfolk_Southern_Railway Norfolk Southern train running along the tracks outside the speedway, although the tracks were recently moved back 100 feet.
Although sold for $192 million in 2004, the track continues to prosper under the new ownership of International Speedway Corporation. The track hosts two NASCAR Cup races, currently the Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500 in March and the Xfinity 500 in October, along with Xfinity, Camping World Truck, and Late Model Stock Car races. The track had plans to add an additional 20,000 seats along the backstretch, boosting capacity to over 85,000 seats, but nothing more has been officially mentioned regarding this by track management since the sale of the track to ISC.