Someone Abandoned a Real NASCAR Stock Car at the Closed Kentucky Speedway
The Drive ·
Kentucky Speedway was pulled from the NASCAR schedule after the 2020 season, and this machine has seemingly been parked there for years. The post Someone Abandoned a Real NASCAR Stock Car at the Closed Kentucky Speedway appeared first on The Drive .
Have you ever unpacked your bag after a long trip, only to realize you left something in the hotel room? Maybe it was your favorite pen or a phone charger. Well, this is kind of like that, only different. Someone seems to have left an entire stock car behind at Kentucky Speedway, which closed years ago.
The person behind the urban exploration YouTube channel decayingmidwest spotted the car while at the track. They say Kentucky Speedway itself is abandoned, but public records show it still belongs to Speedway Motorsports. The track’s website even says it’s available for rental use, although it has been inactive for a while. Instead of being left to rot completely after exiting the NASCAR schedule in 2020, the Rusty Wallace Racing Experience ran events at the track until 2024.
Tracing this racer’s history is a bit tricky. Trevor Bayne’s name is written above the door, and while the 2011 Daytona 500 winner famously drove the No. 6 car, his was a Ford. This looks to be a NASCAR Racing Experience demo car wrapped to look like Bayne’s Cup car, complete with the Performance Plus Motor Oil livery he ran in 2016 and 2017.
These racing experience cars are retired racers from various series. Some ran the national NASCAR circuit, while others competed in ARCA feeder series. Either way, they’ve all been fitted with a passenger seat, as customers pay money to ride shotgun on real tracks like Kentucky Speedway. If your pockets are especially deep, you can even drive one for a few laps.
It’s fun to wonder where this car raced in the past, but unless its owner recovers it, this particular No. 6 is unlikely to see track action again. While some sellers would have you believe that barn finds are best, sitting for years on end can do a lot of damage to a car. Let’s hope that the fluids were drained before it was parked.
While it’s been years since Kentucky Speedway hosted a big-time event, the facility hasn’t been entirely left alone. In addition to the racing experience that ran there most recently, Ford used the complex’s vast parking space to store Super Duty trucks during the semiconductor chip shortage a while back. The Blue Oval stashed so many pickups at the track that you could actually see them from space .
I definitely don’t recommend doing what these guys did and letting yourself inside the track. Even though there’s apparently zero security presence, it’s still trespassing. Some people get a kick out of it, but if you aren’t careful, you might find yourself kicked out by local law enforcement.
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The post Someone Abandoned a Real NASCAR Stock Car at the Closed Kentucky Speedway appeared first on The Drive .