1977 Old Dominion 500
auto race held at Martinsville Speedway in 1977
The 1977 Old Dominion 500 was a NASCAR Winston Cup Series racing event that took place on September 25, 1977, at the historic Martinsville Speedway; a race track that has enjoyed the presence of NASCAR since its first sanctioned race on July 4, 1948.
Cup Series races are still held on the track today in addition to the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series (started in 1982) and Craftsman Truck Series (started in 1995). Since the track was repaved back in 1976, the one-year-old concrete surface allowed cars to travel at relatively fast speeds for a short track during the 1970s.
Background
Martinsville Speedway is one of five short tracks to hold NASCAR races. The standard track at Martinsville Speedway is a four-turn short track oval that is 0.526 miles (0.847 km) long. The track's turns are banked at eleven degrees, while the front stretch, the location of the finish line, is banked at zero degrees. The back stretch also has a zero degree banking.
Race report
It took three hours and thirty-four minutes for the race to completely progress from the first green flag to the checkered flag. Had the race been held on this day in the year 2010, temperatures would have reached 93.0 °F (33.9 °C) - an increase of 16.8 degrees Fahrenheit from the temperatures of 1977. Five hundred laps on a paved oval track spanning 0.252 miles (0.406 km) per lap was the official distance of the race dictated by NASCAR. A grand total of 262.5 miles (422.5 km) was calculated from all the laps of the race.
“1977 Old Dominion 500” enters the record as auto race held at Martinsville Speedway in 1977. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dominion, auto and race can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “1977 Old Dominion 500” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.