NASCAR is back, old-school style, as the on-track activity for 2025 opens with a return to the “Mecca of Madhouse” for Sunday night’s Clash preseason event at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The quarter-mile oval — notorious for its rough-and-tumble racing and numerous fights — at a 17,000-seat football stadium where NCAA Division II member Winston-Salem State University plays its home games will host a Cup Series event for the first time since 1971 with the exhibition race.
“I think it’s great that the location is changing, and I think it should change every year,” Hendrick Motorsports driver Alex Bowman said. “We have the capability of doing it. Continuing to evolve it and do different things is kind of what NASCAR has become all about. I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds.”
NASCAR’s annual unofficial kickoff to a new season was held at Daytona International Speedway from 1979 to 2021 as the warmup act to the Daytona 500, the regular-season opener for the top-tier Cup Series. NASCAR stepped outside the box in 2022 and moved the Clash across the country to the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which has hosted track and field for two editions of the Summer Olympics (and will again in 2028) along with pro and college football, with the University of Southern California having played there for more than a century.
The venue was transformed into a temporary short track for three editions of the Clash, but last year, heavy rain and the potential for flooding forced NASCAR into an unprecedented scramble to cram all on-track activities into one day — resulting in a financial bloodbath for the sanctioning body. And the racing at the Coliseum was by no means good as drivers struggled to string together multiple green-flag laps, resulting in caution-heavy crashfests that were anything but entertaining.