Carolina Mill Town is 'Hollywood of NASCAR'

M O O R E S V I L L E,  N. C.,  May 10, 2002 -- Walk into one of the dozens of glittering chrome and steel buildings around Mooresville, N.C., and you're likely to hear something rather unusual in such corporate-like settings: the whine of drills, welders, sanders and grinders.

Continue down a carpeted corridor, through a set of gleaming double doors — and you find the source of the noise: NASCAR central.

Here is where they build the stockcars of NASCAR — top-of-the-line, high-octane, NASCAR-winning little vehicles painted with some of the biggest money-making numbers in the sport. And the cars aren't just built here; they're designed, re-designed and — after each NASCAR race — rebuilt and repaired here.

'It All Starts From Right Here'

There are more than 50 race teams headquartered in Mooresville and almost everyone of them maintains their cars in multi-million dollar, sprawling high-tech complexes so fancy locals call one of them the "Garage Majal."

A stroll into top racer Rusty Wallace's shop reveals something more like an airplane hangar than a garage: cavernous, bustling and clean as a whistle. Half a dozen cars are undergoing repair and renovation, but not a drop of oil or spilled paint is in sight. On the leading edge of one car, evidence of an unfortunate tangle in last week's race is being erased by a mini-hive of crew team members.

Wallace is proud of the place. He's an adherent to the philosophy of keeping standards high in this intensely competitive, mechanically complicated sport.

Each day, engineers hone frame and engine bits and parts to exact specifications, sometimes secret specifications. They build the cars starting just with long rows of pipe, welded to unrelenting standards set by NASCAR and the drivers themselves.

There's no room for error, mess or disorder here. Wallace points out that drivers' lives can depend on the work done in these shops: "All the little shops right here, you know, on Thursday afternoon or morning, when all these trucks set out across the United States to go to the race, it all starts from right here."

From Bust to Boom

And that's not something the leadership of Mooresville, population 19,000, would have predicted a decade ago.

Back then, it was a mill town, with a mill in trouble. The Burlington Mill was laying off workers, on its way to shutting down. The handwriting on the wall was not promising good things down the road.

"Everything started to fall, just like dominoes," explains Joe Knox, the mayor of Mooresville then.

The mill's slide painted a vision for his town that he didn't like one bit. "I saw it becoming, looking like a town of the old West, with plywood over the windows," Knox says.

But a couple of NASCAR teams saw something they liked in Mooresville — the quiet pace of life, the lots of open land nearby, proximity to both the interstates (a necessity for teams that travel by road each week) and nearby Lake Norman (a favorite for families of crew members and drivers) — and they approached the town about setting up their headquarters there.

Don Miller, president of Penske Racing, was among the first. He didn't exactly get the red carpet treatment.

"Naw," he drawls, leaning across one winning stockcars now displayed in his shop's shiny showroom. "You know, they thought a bunch of stock car racers coming in here and start building cars, you're gonna have junk laying all over the place and oil on the lawn." He laughs a bit. "So we tried hard to change that image."

It took some doing. Developer Cecile Ebert says the thought of NASCAR in town "didn't appeal at all" at first.

"As a matter of fact," she says with a wry smile, "we turned away two or three race teams, simply because we had the naïve conception" — here her smile broadens — "that they were not what we were looking for in our industrial park."

Today, that's about all you'll find in the industrial parks here: team headquarters, NASCAR parts shops, even NASCAR pit crew training schools. The racing industry is today so vital to Mooresville that the town now calls itself "Race City USA", a logo emblazoned in red, white and blue on the water tower.

"We employ a ton, a ton of people in Mooresville, North Carolina," says Wallace.

Rubbing Elbows with the Stars

Kyle Harvey is one of the indirect beneficiaries. "This is the Hollywood of NASCAR right here," he says. "This is where the stars of the medium hang out."

As one who's worked the racing circuit in the past, he realized Mooresville was on a fast track and decided to open a diner, complete with racing memorabilia: Poppa's Hot Dogs. In its first year here, it has become a favorite lunch spot of NASCAR crew members and, quite often, drivers and their families.

For anyone interested in NASCAR, that can be a treat.

"I won't say who," Harvey winks, "but there's been some pretty major deals gone down for Winston Cup Racing in here. I've been privileged to lean over," he says, nodding his head in the direction of the corner table, "and hear them."

And as for the mill, developers haven't forgotten it. It's being renovated to house NASCAR-related businesses, re-dubbed "Victory Lane Mills."

Quite a ride for a town that was once facing an economic dead-end.

"Racing has been the driving force of Mooresville," says Ebert with a chuckle.