Abandoned Rockingham Speedway: FULL TOUR! (Hidden NASCAR History In Storage)

i feel like we're not supposed to drive up here but we are still in plastic wrap like they knew how to build things back then so yeah turn it on we're checking out every square inch of this place today this room is a documentary in and of itself it was the last tough series race here ever yeah that is awesome nascar track infield care center 90s go this is it you don't really understand the banking here unless you're actually here you want to see the boneyard i want to see the boneyard if we saw a dead body in there man this would go so viral we're standing right outside of turn one at the not so abandoned anymore rockingham speedway this video is going to be a time capsule of what it looked like before it gets all brought back to life what do you do here i'm pretty sure i don't have a job title nor do i have any responsibilities yet i find myself working about 80 hours a week so i feel like that sometimes too yeah man look at all this all this sand built is this just from the wind building this up yeah that and it's coming down from there that's crazy so the last time there was a cup series race here was february 2004 is that right i remember watching that race on tv wow that's where that hand truck is man it's just a bunch of bathrooms is that all this is up here are all of these just bathrooms bathrooms and concession stands and kitchens this is a lot of really good restaurant equipment and has this been sitting here since 0-4 yeah i'm pretty sure i mean a lot of it's kind of newer so i think a lot of it was probably installed pretty recently like the fire suppression systems have never been used they're all still super shiny and we have the contractor coming in um to take these bleachers out so they've been kind of going through everything sometimes you find one of the old menus for food like you know nachos and hot dogs it's unbelievable how cheap everything was yeah four dollars for a beer that's a 1998 oh my god wow they have some overhead shots and i swear to merchant merchant vehicles were literally littered everywhere it blew my mind how much infrastructure would come here for races yeah that's so freaking cool i don't know if this this gopro does this justice just to stand here look at this place it's literally like snapchat the same as it was at that last race in 2004 if you look at pictures now i do know that these grandstands back here were removed and are now part of zmax dragway yeah they went to charlotte i think bruton smith was the one that brought him over there and uh he told me on the phone that we were pointing out the missing black fence over there that i guess there was some problem at atlanta with a storm and they had the same kind of fencing over there because it was all brutal smith so they just took that from there and put it in atlanta yeah so that's why that's not there if you watched that last video if you didn't see that last video you should check that out too you know you see the square on the ground where something should have been and then a year down the road you realize oh this is where a battery backup was for this thing or whatever but all of all that good stuff seems to be missing the best view in the whole place as far as i'm concerned is the camera stand up there let's go up there yeah i mean all this stuff seems to be in pretty good shape still it really is well it's one solid piece of metal so like literally the whole thing would have to all of the ground would have to cave in at once for anything to happen wow this is awesome how athletic am i feeling uh-huh we gotta go over the fence we can go all the way to turn one and then walk all the way back yeah i think we can climb over it that's what i do you're tall over it can't you i thought this was like a treacherous drop it's going like 10 feet yeah only 10 feet we're okay now it's limbo time let me call ronnie oh my god he's been here since 82. oh ronnie knows everything about this place ronnie the track historian where have i heard that one before yeah there's multiple things under here oh ronnie please answer buddy he always answers my thoughts i mean i've been fighting weeds here since my first day almost three years ago and it's just such a daunting task they're everywhere ever i mean they're everywhere i i dream i dream about wheat i'm not kidding about better ways to kill weeds what is this down here just like one of the flag guys from the olden days or something i'm assuming it was yeah because i mean obviously that's something for somebody to stand on i just i don't know why the pit was ever made except for maybe drainage don't step down here yeah those little burrs i just got thorns stuck in my ankle these look newer than everything else we spent a couple days doing nothing but crawling around that building trying to find the different lines that control those lights we finally figured it out and i mean i'm talking i don't know if i've ever been happier when we got those lights working so this this truck was purchased new and was on like utility duty at this track and stayed with the track this whole time we we got another thing that we did uh during that same winter we got the caution lights working was we got the truck running so oh that's cool was this thing like buried in some building somewhere uh yeah well it was it was in the pit garage oh yeah is there anything cool in the domino's place so that's plumbing stuff i mean it's a bunch of pvc and glass oh so there's did they used to sell pizza out of there or is it just an ad you know what i don't know but yeah i mean there's some hot dog stands these used to roll around here oh this is cool wow well you can't really see it that well but there's a whole bunch of pvc here for drainage for toilets this is an old refrigerator yeah i uh yeah i'm not sure it's been open since it could smell like death i was expecting to see like a head in there if we saw a dead body in there man this would go so viral [Laughter] that'll go with the intro we're checking out every square ish of this place today so we hop back in old elvis here we're gonna go check out the the little rock track while we still have daylight man that's that's super eerie the grandstands over there that got ripped out that's so weird you want to see the bone yard i want to see the boneyard what's the boneyard what the heck so this is the boneyard oh wow looks like a really big one that's what we need for the shop yeah oh a scoreboard [Music] that is so freaking this used to be the running table um on the infield by thunder alley what flavor is your rowdy i like the orange one it tastes like orange spicy shout out to rowdy so we're gonna walk back there and find some more cool stuff i was not prepared for this at all i'm gonna get all kinds of stuff stuck in my legs i'm just doing it we gotta do it for the shot the boneyard does not disappoint what is that a good wrench surface something 400 wow i think there was a race called the good wrench something 400 back in the 90s here i think we have uh i think we have advertisements for it i can't wait to show you some of these rooms oh my god i'm pumped i am so pumped for this those are really distinct shades of orange and blue right yeah did it break i guess i mean there's a huge piece over there oh that's the sign and the face yeah oh my god there's another huge piece over there right there yeah when did you know when they took that down you know what i don't you don't this is the coolest thing ever the old turn style thingy some fence man yeah it's a diamond tread golf cart no it says rock card on it we had a 76 golf cart somewhere i don't know where that is where did the how the the press box used to say north carolina motor speedway yeah i have that old sign really yeah like the big letters that were up there the massive one oh wow they sodium lights yeah and those are all the lot signs god wow that paint wasn't off that's cool so i i was actually thinking about making this a table and selling it for charity or something like that that'd be cool yeah the old squirrel blower contract that's powered by a pto so that was before the jet dryer era yep wow here's an old mountain dew can so old it actually says mountain on it where did that um board come from where was that at before uh that's the old scoreboard where was it positioned on the track oh uh you know i i thought it was on the infield the design right there it's made to sit on top of a post yeah that's in the ground on a concrete slab with these bolts that come out and there's a few different positions where that could have been okay yeah check that out bush hogging now out of the bone yard where all the freaking mosquitoes are just got mauled literally we're sitting here for 10 seconds just getting our you know those little burrs off our feet there was just like 900 of them just flew in at the same time elvis putting in work today i'm glad we didn't watch this thing recently be my guest oh hell yeah here we go anything's a race car if you race it this is neat it's like you can take the low line and have no banking you go up and then you have it wow yeah that is steep you don't really understand the banking here unless you're actually here yeah i can't wait to go in there by the way if you guys aren't aware yet you need to go look into the rpm act and sign it because the epa is trying to ruin everything that we find fun and passionate about and care about so um yeah go check that out talk to your local government officials they actually do want to help you oh i know my florida officials responded to me like within a few hours you uh you want to do the the buildings or thunder alley um bow phone you can kill this and then we'll go in there okay we're gonna make some uh laps around the track and elvis just for fun yes cameraman jamie feel free to narrate absolutely passing the rockingham speedway safety truck with the aftermarket water cooler listen to that thing go gmc's really doing good work today i don't know what i'm doing okay so we're about to go around rockingham by ourselves in elvis the lpg anything's a race car if you race it damn it let's go find out what this banking is like in a freaking duramax pickup truck now going into turn one and coming out of turn two is the most terrifying experience of my life here we go coming out of turn two he seems to be taking a pretty conservative line there no maybe i can't do this it stresses me out can we stop no babe babe i don't want to be doing this it doesn't even feel like returning i'm scared we're going 60 miles an hour now i know my dealers are like this seat below i can't see anything right here ah i thought you said that we would be done yeah i'll be done how often you can just hop onto a freaking track like this by yourself in your pickup truck and just do whatever ah that is terrifying if you're not going fast it's gonna take a very unconventional pit down the road course and he's going to run the track in reverse all right nascar thunder 2003 let's go the wrong way and hit everybody [Music] leave a comment if you did that too there's two kinds of people people who did that and liars whoo she did not like that at all where does the tour proceed from now we're gonna check out the yeah so we can go over to we can go in the pit garages if you want and then uh we can hit the media center okay and then we can hit the uh the hospital and the old tool shed the the old guard calls us the goodyear building um the newer ones called it the bts building we stuck with that name what's bts bts black's tire service oh so is this blue paint original and you guys just painted the other stuff the same color yes we changed the shade of the blue on the outside this this is brand new so that was good year blue in there uh yeah i guess so i never really thought about that nobody wants to use them but i love them so this is the old safety clean oh how cool are those it's like a little truck yeah hell yeah is that was that like harry potter's owls bedroom door or something up there nobody knows seriously nobody knows it and here's the one we're working on wow so this is what the one on over there looked like before you started yes exactly so this is how it would have been left from winston cup era right or i guess one race of next telecom right yeah what's this north carolina speedway where was that at this i found underneath the scorers building now the scorers building was the one on the corner over there yeah past the bts building and uh it was literally condemned it it was dangerous to walk inside it was just so decrepit and uh literally like there was this weird crawl space at the bottom that uh nobody wanted to go into because it was scary and i'm talking scary you know like i swear like some sort of sorcery was being done down there because it was terrifying every time you walk close you get attacked by bees uh and then so we were gonna burn it down you know we called the fire department and everything we're like hey we're gonna do a controlled burn on this because it's gonna be way cheaper to do that than to demo it right before we did that i said okay i'm gonna brave the crawl space guys guys we can't burn this down yet wow so where where did this sign come from where was it originally uh from what i know it was on the on the press box wasn't it oh so this is the old old one i was talking about the white letters in the same font that's up there now that say north carolina or speedway oh oh that one uh so there's only seven of those letters exist i think now um we found we found those gosh where did we find those i think we yeah we found them up in an old uh up in a room up there i can actually show them to you wow this is crazy so this is probably on like the old main press box before they built that one right that's crazy so they race arca here until 0.8 that's still 12 years ago look at these things i remember all sport from when i was like five mm-hmm all right have you ever found any like old pictures of these things back in the day or anything you know what i haven't i haven't we need to do some digging yeah right i love that this thing is still getting used racing returns to the rock how symbolic is that we got white letter bfgs on there it's all set if you guys watching this video are interested in this stuff make sure you hit the subscribe button because this is what we do now we find cool things like this and we look at it and show you things that no one has ever seen before so do it what is this place this is the old media center wow these are the old pairs from the conference room in the office is that a slot car track this is a 36 feet wide slot car track that has two massive like uh uh motors that inverters on it that uh that power it's there is so much power running through this thing it's terrifying um but yeah it's huge it's one of a kind it was built by an engineer in south carolina is that a boxing ring yes that is boxing is that a rcr banner from the last race here and then the truck series victory lane thing i would imagine okay so when are we going to set that up and have um post-race boxing matches here actually yeah i mean judging by the state of things it's probably coming pretty soon if i could have done homework in here i feel like i would have taken homework more seriously why do you walk in here and think homework first because it looks like a good spot to do homework no one can bother you and you can like look at cool stuff oh we got the lights on wow i feel like i'm in 1995 right now this is awesome i think these uh these oops that things these ethernet connections are 1995 too i believe i think that's dsl oh are these like the phone numbers for each one of these spots so someone could be like yeah reach me at and it rings their phone there they did interviews that's cool and whatnot wow yeah you can see where they would tack up the backboard so like the post race uh crap in here this is pretty cool there's a dark room in here associated press darkroom that is awesome so they had their own dark room in here with a little sink i can only wonder how many pictures i've seen that came from this room right and then in here they do they have uh some soundproof radio rooms there's that guy radio interview and here's another one it's actually pretty acoustically friendly in here wow yeah it's very dull you can just feel the dullness when you talk wow we'll kind of stuff all over the wall spiderwebs things like that yeah this this is going to be um there's a third one we uh this is something that we're completely overhauling um what is it gonna be used for uh so i mean media still because this up up above is uh the best place for cameras on the infield it's got line of sight to every part of the track um so they put cameras up there we just had the roof redone the roof is beautiful 2013 media look at all these lug nuts this is the things i didn't expect to see in here a boxing ring and a slot car track a one-of-a-kind custom built slot contract behind you where did where was that from like uh so what if there was more stuff to do so that's a part of that and we're kind of just slowly but surely upfitting different areas and eventually i mean this this place will be you know a fully functioning adult disneyland again to me when when i was little went to races there was all kinds of stuff to do like the little rc cars slot cars all that stuff it was like that's what got me into it so i fully support that you could stay in here for hours i don't know which one's worse this or the hospital because this one this is where all the banners and stuff are and it's next to the old welding shop which has a lot of cool tools in it and stuff but yeah this guy over here is oh oh my you weren't kidding there's a lot of stuff in here wow yeah it's and old conference tables and desks and cheerwine coolers and parking things and banners and the i-beam for like pulling engines out of the back of trucks and whatever it is they're doing [Music] what is that banner i don't know i've never heard of it damsel i don't either what's up what is this giant oh that's a victory lane backdrop so this so the bleachers section that we moved uh to watch the road course over here in front of the pickard this actually fits into the slots on the side on the back of it it used to face this straight away right here okay yeah this is pretty cool what what is this thing like a little light up backlit sign deal yeah i mean so it's it has slots for pegs so oh look old ernie irving hat i don't know what else is in there look at this thing no cylinders yeah those are old filing cabinets say nc motor speedway yeah there's nothing in it yeah all the old uh so the the red that we use is actually called winston red really yeah um and so the uh the paint company actually didn't have it on file anymore because it was so old so we uh we went online and we got a good shot of a pack of winston cigarettes and we had them copy that red so that we could still do it but i don't think it can be called winston red anymore for copyright reasons yeah what's this old banner here have you dug this up i have no idea i don't even know there's so much you see these credentials signs everywhere apparently the old guard was very concerned with people's credentials i don't know what the pop secret 400 was but this is addressed to north carolina motor speedway oh what is this this is winston cup banners are these go over trash cans or something yeah yeah wow are you gonna wear it i probably shouldn't i'm not a trash can uh yeah that is awesome race tickets souvenirs oh i thought it was cooler stuff [Music] time only happens once and this is the closest i'll ever get to be to be in here this place since heyday i can't wait to see what these guys do with it and i want to be as big of help i can to get this this back to life again my girlfriend and i actually one night decided to get where's the story…