The forgotten Norfolk Speedway
Stock Car Racing History
A couple of items from the website LittleJoeWeatherly.com regarding Norfolk & Virginia Beach tracks:
Virginia Beach Speedway: A 3/8 mile sand oval built on the intersection of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard in 1948. It was used through until 1960, and was also known as Joe Weatherly Speedway and Chinese Corner Speedway.
Chinese Corner Speedway. Thats a track that Joe Weatherly and Paul Sawyer (of Richmond International track fame) promoted.
Norfolk had two racetracks in the '40s: Virginia Beach and Princess Anne speedways. About this time Paul Sawyer started building race cars with an early NASCAR star and fellow Norfolkian and Virginia native, Joe Weatherly. In the early '50s, Weatherly asked Sawyer to invest in a speedway in Wilson, N.C. and Virginia Beach. With a $5,000 investment, Sawyer took the raceway ownership, management and promotional plunge. Sawyer bought Joe Weatherly out in 1956.
Sawyer also became involved in the Virginia Beach Speedway on Virginia Beach Boulevard near Witchduck Road, and in 1955, Sawyer joined Weatherly as co-owner of Richmond Fairgrounds Raceway (aka Atlantic Rural Fairgrounds") - the humble dirt-track precursor of today's 83,000-seat facility. The Virginia Beach speedway was also promoted as the Joe Weatherly Speedway.
By 1960, events conspired to cause Sawyer to sharpen his focus on Richmond. On Easter Sunday 1958, a fire wiped out the Wilson track, and by 1960, escalating rents at the Virginia Beach speedway and lack of expansion space for parking made its continued operation unfeasible.
At the rate they're going, ISC will soon tear down all the seats at Richmond that we worked so hard to build back in the 90s. The news item of the latest Richmond grandstandtear downbrings tears to my eyes. I watched every one of those seats constructed on a daily basis when I was Media Relations Director at Richmond from 1990-1999. Just pitiful.