NASCAR Camping World Trucks Series
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TRUCKS: The Rock Returns
Truck Series race scheduled Sunday as Rockingham Speedway refires…
Mike Hembree  |  Posted April 09, 2012   Charlotte, NC
Rockingham Speedway will host the 2012 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series Good Sam Road Assistance 200 this Sunday. (Photo: Getty Images)
It’s NASCAR race week at Rockingham Speedway.

It’s been a while.

The last time a NASCAR major series stopped at the Rock was February 2004, when the Sprint Cup Series closed out its long run at the track in the North Carolina Sand Hills. At that point, many observers assumed NASCAR would never race again at the one-mile track. In fact, there were even questions about the long-term survival of the facility.

Andy Hillenburg, former driver, changed all that.

Hillenburg and a partner bought the track, Hillenburg became president, and then work began. It reaches a high point Sunday with the scheduled running of the Good Sam Road Assistance 200, the third race of the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series season. The 12:30 p.m. race will be televised by SPEED.

On Monday, Hillenburg was busy handling final details on the first day of race week.

“I feel pretty good about where we are,” he said. “I’ve done a couple of walk-throughs this morning, and everything is looking good. Robert Ingram, who runs the speedway, is very, very thorough. I feel like he has us in really good position.”

The Truck series will share the weekend with the UARA Late Models and the Frank Kimmel Street Stock series. All three series are scheduled to practice Friday. The Late Models and Street Stocks will race Saturday, and Truck qualifying is scheduled at 3:30 Saturday.

The town of Rockingham will celebrate the return of big-league racing to the track Friday with Thunderfest, a racing festival scheduled for Harrington Square in downtown Rockingham. That event will run from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and will include a 7 p.m. autograph session by Truck series drivers.

Hillenburg said long-time Rockingham fans will see the track much as it was when NASCAR left “except that it’s going to be better in a lot of ways – and more colorful. There will be more things to see, and there’s going to be the excitement of something being gone for so long and now it working back in. I think that excitement factor is really big.”

The biggest change at the entrance to the speedway is the presence of two big rocks instead of one. A granite boulder containing the names of the track’s Sprint Cup winners now sits alongside a similar rock designed to hold the names of winners since the track reopened.

Hillenburg said ticket sales are going well, “but we’re kind of in new territory here, so it’s hard to know where we should be. I feel like we’re doing well, but we still need to do better.”

When Rockingham hosted NASCAR events in late winter and late autumn, weather was often a problem. The advance forecast for this weekend is promising, but Hillenburg said the weather isn’t on his list of worries.

“That’s one thing I can’t change,” he said. “I haven’t even looked. I don’t want to worry about it because I just want to focus on doing the job. I’m not going to quit working until they throw the green flag, and even then I’ll still be doing things with the maintenance crew and the ushers and everything.

“I won’t really stop so much until it’s all over.”

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
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