Day 15 – Lexington to Bristol

I had another later start to the day as it was just on 10am before I left Lexington. I put Bristol Motor Speedway into the GPS and headed in that direction. Driving south east on the I-75 the landscape turned quite hilly and the vegetation a lot more dense, I was told by the GPS to turn onto Highway 25 East and just then I was at the town of Corbin and saw a sign saying to turn right to see the Birthplace of KFC. Colonel Saunders started his first fried chicken restaurant and hotel in Corbin and the KFC there is still on the site of the original restaurant. There is a lot of memorabilia and the old kitchen is either still there or has been rebuilt as it was then (could not find out which was correct).

Leaving Corbin I headed further South East along Highway 25 E and crossed the border into Tennessee at Cumberland Gap where the road goes through a road tunnel.

I was in Tennessee all of 5 minutes when I turned onto Highway 58 and drove immediately into the state of Virginia.

The highway is also known as the Daniel Boon Trail, you can actually walk the trail which roughly follows the roadway along the highway.

The highway is also known as the Daniel Boon Trail, you can actually walk the trail which roughly
follows the roadway along the highway.
The scenery is wonderful, there are so many hills and mountains completely covered in trees and you travel up and down them crossing from valley to valley.

After a while you again cross over into Tennessee and travel south towards Bristol. I will admit that in this section of Virginia and Tennessee I have never seen so many churches anywhere in my travels. There seems to be a church every mile or two along the road, mostly smaller buildings but still they are everywhere.

I arrived in theBristol area and noticed the signage for ticket scalpers straight away. There were quite a few of them along the road.

I then got my first sight of the Raceway 

I arrived at the All American Campground about 4.30pm and at the campsite was given all my passes and stickers for the week. I found my campsite relatively easily only once having to ask for a direction. There was only one other tent set up so far in my row of 14 sites. But I expect more will come over the next three days.

I got the tent up quite easily but twice put the fly cover up wrong before figuring out how it was to go on properly. Luckily I had bought some extra tent pegs at Walmart as the ones that came with the tent were useless. It was only when I had everything up and stepped back that I realised that I was right over to one side of my allotted site but decided not to move it and hopefully it will be alright where it is. Time will tell. Below is a photo of the rental car and tent.

In all it took me about 30 minutes to set up the tent at it was about 30C so I was happy to be able to sit down and have a cool drink of water and get my breath back. I then got out sleeping bag, mat and pillow into the tent before heading off to the race track for the nights races.

Or the way I stopped and hired a scanner and headphones set. It costs $43 for the weekend and it allows you to listen to many different channels at the race track. You can listen to the ground commentators, the race officials, and television or radio commentary, to any of the drivers own radio channels or set it to scan across a mixture of channels. Having the headphones also blocks out the noise of the cars flying past.

Walking to the racetrack from my tent site took 10 minutes and included two huge hills that take your breath away. There is a golf cart that you can get from the bottom but there was a queue so I walked up.

At the top of the hill you get a good feel for the size of the raceway from outside. These photos are from the Southern end of the stadium.

I had pre-booked the Friday and Saturday night seats but the Wednesday night is general admission and sit where you want (although some sections of seating were not open) the ticket cost $30 for the night. I bought a glass of ice cold squeezed lemonade and headed up into the stands to watch the racing.

The first race had already been going 15 laps by the time I got to a seat. The stands are quite steep and you enter at approx. Row 20 and all the seating below was already taken. Turning to look up the stand so were most of the next 30 rows. I walked up to row 56 before finding a free area that I was not going to have to climb over someone to get to. Unfortunately about 6 rows in front was a steel post supporting the roof. I sat there for a while but moved later on to another section that I did not have to worry about the pole.

I took a panorama series of shots from this end of the stadium.

The first race was for modified race cars over 150 laps, there seemed to be a car spin out or crash every 5 to ten laps so there were a lot of yellow flag laps with the pace car. Listening to the scanner provided a lot of interesting pieces of information, from pit crews talking about tyre changes to the officials telling cars what positions they needed to be in on restarts etc.

When the race finished they had a presentation and then introduced all the drivers for the 200 lap Truck race that was on later. I managed to go down to the back of the grandstand and get some dinner from the concession stands.

Before the second race started they sang the national anthem and then the race was on. The trucks closely resemble pickup trucks and the closest racing we would have would be the Ute races that are on before the V8 Supercar races.

Once again there were plenty of stoppages for crashes and spin outs, if you spin out you inevitably hit a wall and some car parts end up on the track, where one of the four debris truck and crews come around to pick up the debris before the pace car pulls off the track and the race restarts.

The race was quite competitive with the lead changing a few times and the top 7 cars changing positions often during the racing. Finally the chequered flag came down and the winner drove his car onto the winner’s podium and there were some fireworks and speeches as the crowd started to leave the stadium.

I bought some shirts and a program on the way back to my tent and sat for a while listening to music that was coming from other sites in the camp ground. After about an hour I jumped into the tent and fell asleep. I only woke once during the night and had to go about 50 metres to get to the portable toilets. It was about 3am in the morning and all the lights from the race track were still on.