NASCAR announced that its Craftsman Truck Series will race at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem on Aug. 20, 2027, marking the first time the national series has ever competed on the quarter-mile oval known to fans as the Madhouse. The race will run as a doubleheader alongside the track's local weekly series finale and will broadcast nationally on FOX Sports.
Because the tiny bullring cannot fit a standard 36-truck national series field, NASCAR will have to establish special event procedures, likely including heat races, to whittle the field down before the main event, according to Motorsport.com. The move echoes the format NASCAR used for its Cup Series Clash exhibitions at the venue, which capped the main-event field at 23 cars, per the outlet.
The announcement itself came with a bit of theater. As WFMY-TV reports, NASCAR revealed the news live at the track during opening ceremonies for Bowman Gray's 2026 season-ending weekly meet, with driver Rajah Caruth rolling a No. 7 Chevrolet truck out onto the quarter-mile oval ahead of the night's Modified division races.
Why the Clash Is Leaving as the Trucks Arrive
The Truck Series debut comes as NASCAR's preseason Cup Series exhibition, the Clash, exits Winston-Salem after a two-year run. Chase Elliott won the inaugural 2025 Clash at Bowman Gray, and Ryan Preece took the 2026 edition, the station's report notes, but the exhibition is heading back to Daytona International Speedway for 2027.
Winter weather made the call for NASCAR. A February 2026 storm dumped 8 to 10 inches of snow on Winston-Salem and forced a three-day delay of the Clash, per the same account. Track crews reportedly had to haul more than 40 dump trucks' worth of snow out of the stadium before that race could even proceed, prompting NASCAR to move its winter exhibition to Florida while replacing it with a late-summer points race better suited to the region's climate.
Hoodline previously reported on the Clash's Daytona return earlier this month, before NASCAR had confirmed what would replace it at Bowman Gray.
A Track NASCAR Committed to for Decades
The scheduling shift wasn't a retreat from Winston-Salem. NASCAR acquired Winston-Salem Speedway, Inc. in March 2024, securing an operational lease with the City of Winston-Salem to manage racing operations at Bowman Gray through December 2050, according to RACER. That long-term commitment ended multi-generational management of the venue by the Hawkins family, who had promoted weekly races there since the track's inception.
Bowman Gray's ties to NASCAR run back to the sanctioning body's earliest days. Weekly NASCAR sanctioning at the stadium began in 1949 under an agreement between NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. and Alvin Hawkins, the organization's first head flagman, making it NASCAR's longest-running weekly short track.
The Long Wait Since the Last National Points Race
The last NASCAR Cup Series points race at Bowman Gray took place in 1971, the Myers Brothers 250, and it went 53 years without an officially credited winner until NASCAR formally awarded the victory to Hall of Famer Bobby Allison in October 2024, per Sports Illustrated. Allison had driven a Grand American division Ford Mustang against Cup cars that day, which fed a long-running scoring dispute with runner-up Richard Petty. The 2027 Truck Series race will be the stadium's first national series points race since that long-disputed 1971 finish.
WPA Roots and a Home Field for WSSU
Bowman Gray Stadium's origins trace to the Depression era. Construction began in 1937 as a Works Progress Administration project costing roughly $100,000, partially funded by a $30,000 donation from Nathalie Gray in memory of her late husband, former R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company executive Bowman Gray. The stadium originally hosted collegiate football and horse racing before its quarter-mile oval was paved in 1947.
Beyond racing, the stadium has served as the home field for the Winston-Salem State University Rams NCAA Division II football program since 1943, and its grandstands hold roughly 17,000 spectators, according to Winston-Salem State University. Located just a block from the WSSU campus, it stands as the largest Division II football venue in North Carolina, giving the track a dual identity as both NASCAR's historic grassroots home and the gridiron home of an HBCU football powerhouse.
For a facility built to survive the Depression and now committed to NASCAR through 2050, the arrival of a national truck race adds a new chapter to a track that has already outlasted plenty of scoring disputes, snowstorms, and schedule shuffles, as Spectrum News reported in its account of the announcement.
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