iRacing Laser Scanning North Wilkesboro

Header image as-seen on Dale Earnhardt Jr. Instagram.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. today posted that he had a cleanup crew at the deserted North Wilkesboro to ready the track for laser scanning. This comes after recent social media pressure from him to do it and an offer from Steve Myers (iRacing) that if he got it cleaned up, they’d get it done.

North Wilkesboro Speedway was a 0.625-mile speedway with 14 degrees of banking and an interesting elevation difference one end of the oval to the other. It was first seen in sim racing with NASCAR Racing (Papyrus, 1994) as an addon track. Here is how Geoff Bodine described the track in the manual:

North Wilkesboro is a strange little track. The front straightaway goes downhill, so as you go into turn one you’re out against the wall. You use quite a bit of brakes going into the first corner; there is a groove that’s kinda in the middle of the track going into the corner.

Really the key to some speed at Wilkesboro is, as you go into turn one you get the car turned to go off of turn two. You’ll have to get into the throttle real quick, because going off turn two you’re going uphill. So in one, you wanna try to keep momentum through that corner, but get the car turned and get back into the throttle as soon as possible to get you up that back straightaway, because it’s all uphill, all the way to turn three!

Turn three is a lot different than turn one; the back straightaway is really one big corner, so it’s a long entry into turn three. Use brakes, but gently. The groove in turn three is real low, right against the curb. If you get off the curbing, just a few feet, it’s really rough and the car’ll just slide up the track. So you have to stay low going into turn three, and around to turn four it’s a long exit. This is where the car tends to get really loose. But like turn two, you need to get back into the throttle really quick there, but be smooth; don’t just jam it down, push the throttle down really smooth to give you that speed off the corner. As you get off turn four, you’re lookin’ downhill to turn one.

Then vs now. Track still looks pretty racey pic.twitter.com/EXFMMweeIk

— nascarman (@nascarman_rr) December 10, 2019

Obviously the track may be a little different now but iRacing are apparently going to recreate the track as it was in 1987. This means that Bodine’s description may end up being significantly more like what we end up with. The track should be released in 2020.