Some of today's sponsor-driven race names are a meaningless mouthful (e.g.Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen). But as far back as 1970, one of the events was pretty lengthy too - the Albany-Saratoga 250 at Albany-Saratoga Speedway in Malta NY.
http://bench-racing.blogspot.com/2012/07/july-7-this-day-in-petty-history.html
Four years earlier, on July 7, 1966, the stars and cars of NASCAR's elite Grand National division swung north, but not above the Mason-Dixon line. On July 7, 1966 they were in northern Virginia at Old Dominion Speedway. Elmo Langley would score his second and final GN victory, finishing 7 laps ahead of Big John Sears at the now defunct Gore family racing facility in Manassas, Virginia.
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Fredericksburg, Virginia sportswriter, Buck Knight provided on-site coverage of Elmo Langley's second career Grand National win for the Free Lance Star newspaper:
Jerry Bushmire previously posted this 1966 photo of Elmo in the Woodfield Ford #64 side-by-side on the dirt at Richmond with Richard Petty in #43.
The always likeable Elmo had scored his initial GN win earlier in 1966 at Spartanburg.
After retiring as a driver, Langley fielded Cup cars for such drivers as Tommy Gale and a rookie Ken Schrader. The George Jefferson owned 7-Eleven Ford Thunderbird #07 that I sponsored for Derrike Cope at Richmond in 1984's Wrangler 400 was a former Elmo car.
Elmo would later become the pace car driver for the Cup series and was in Japan for NASCAR when he suffered a massive heart attack and passed. Even the venerable New York Times saw fit to publish an Elmo Langley obituary story:
