NASCAR Cup Racing Returns to North Wilkesboro for Points — First Time Since 1996
The Window World 450 on July 19 is the first Cup Series points race at the legendary short track in 30 years, run at 450 laps on a circuit that didn't exist in its current form until a 2024 repave.
The NASCAR Cup Series races for points at North Wilkesboro Speedway this Sunday, July 19, for the first time in 30 years. The Window World 450 is a 450-lap, 281.25-mile Sunday-night race on the 0.625-mile North Carolina short track — the longest Cup race ever held there, and the 21st points race of the 2026 season. It's also the fourth race of NASCAR's In-Season Challenge tournament. Thirty-seven cars are entered: all 36 chartered teams plus Chad Finchum running an open entry. The track's last points-paying Cup race was September 29, 1996, when Jeff Gordon beat Dale Earnhardt to the line to close out the season there.
North Wilkesboro was one of NASCAR's original tracks, hosting a Cup race in the series' inaugural 1949 season and remaining a fixture for nearly five decades. It lost both of its annual Cup dates after the 1996 season as the sport shifted toward larger, newer facilities, and the track sat mostly idle afterward — buildings deteriorating, vegetation overtaking the grounds. A brief 2010 reopening hosted lower-tier series like the USAR Pro Cup and PASS Super Late Models before the track closed again in the spring of 2011.
The comeback started in 2023, when Speedway Motorsports brought the Cup Series back for the non-points NASCAR All-Star Race — the series' first race at the track in 27 years. That same year, the track got its first full repave since 1981, completed by March 2024, replacing the aged asphalt that had sat through the abandonment years. The All-Star Race has returned each year since, but Sunday's Window World 450 is the first time any of those post-revival races has actually counted toward the championship.
That distinction is what makes this weekend different from the last three years of All-Star exhibitions: bad restarts, late cautions, and pit strategy at North Wilkesboro will now move drivers up or down the points standings, not just decide an exhibition trophy. For a short track built in the 1940s to matter again in a points battle being fought with 2026 aero packages and a 37-car charter field is the rare case of NASCAR's past and its present schedule occupying the same 0.625 miles of asphalt at the same time.
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