I think this pretty much says it all. It not only addresses the current fiasco, it also gives a black and white verification of just what lengths the Frances will go to in order to get what they want. Rockingham saved the sport, now NASCAR doesn't nned them anymore.
I hope and pray the fruit and nut crowd gets tired of racing in about three years. I pray Junior still can't win a title even with the final 10 race junk, and it as stacked in his favor as can be given his history at Talladega, Texas, and Phoenix. I hope that when the Frances come back with their tail tucked between their legs the citizens and commisioners of Darlington and Rockingham and everywhere else that gets screwed tells them to go to hell. We weren't good enough before, go race in California with your new friends.
Article is from catchfence.com. Bold print is from yours truly for emphasis. After reading it, try and tell me NASCAR doesn't make the rules up as they go. But some don't want to hear that, so it just can't be true, right?
Tradition biggest loser in deal
By Ed Hardin
Landmark News Service
Rockingham has gone the way of North Wilkesboro. And Hickory. And Bowman Gray. And Raleigh. And Asheville-Weaverville.
NASCAR has moved on again, and the state that built the sport is left choking on the dust.
The news out of Daytona is, once again, sad. We will race no more at North Carolina Motor Speedway. NASCAR will sacrifice it for a second race at Texas as a part of a convoluted settlement of a convoluted lawsuit. NCMS will be dropped from the 2005 schedule.
After 40 years of racing, the track that once helped save the sport will be left to gather sand and grass while the sport speeds off to bigger races in bigger places.
We shouldn't be surprised. We could see it coming. But it makes it no easier to realize that North Carolina, which once held races at almost 20 different NASCAR tracks, now has one.
We used to race in Greensboro and Hillsborough, Harris and Concord, High Point and Wilson, Shelby and Jacksonville. In 1958, there were 51 races on the NASCAR schedule, and 21 were raced in North Carolina. In 2005, there will be 36 races, and two will be held in North Carolina.
The next schedule will also be without one of the Darlington events, the old track finally losing out to progress and legal battles. Phoenix is expected to add a second race for the 2005 season as the sport continues a trend away from its Southern roots toward nationalism.
The official announcements will not come until later in the summer, and few people in the sport were willing to talk as the news trickled out this week. People in and around Rockingham were more than willing.
"We're mad, we're angry and we're disappointed that we weren't given a chance," Rockingham city manager Monty Crump said. "This was a done deal. We were set up to fail."
There's a lot of truth behind Crump's claim. The races at Rockingham could've easily been saved by moving the winter race to the summer, by adding lights and by NASCAR acknowledging that North Carolina Motor Speedway was an important part of the sport.
The founder of NASCAR, the late Bill France, believed Rockingham saved the sport in 1965.
The yet unbuilt track was scheduled to hold the final event of that season, a year that most in NASCAR remember as the worst ever. Four drivers - Fireball Roberts, Jimmy Pardue, Joe Weatherly and Billy Wade - had died in the previous year. Curtis Turner had been kicked out of the sport for trying to unionize drivers. Chrysler has boycotted the 1965 season because NASCAR had outlawed the hemi engine. And General Motors had pulled out completely.
France feared the sport itself was dying, having been reduced to an all-Ford series without its stars such as Plymouth's Richard Petty, Dodge's David Pearson, along with Junior Johnson and Fred Lorenzen, who were threatening to retire.
A flat oval in the Sandhills of North Carolina became France's opportunity to make a statement in the final race of the season and save his empire.
The story of Rockingham's construction was a major story as engineers fought the elements, a fire and a race against time to finish the project by Oct.31, 1965. The track was finished on Oct.29.
The first American 500 remains one of the most famous races in NASCAR history. France had worked behind the scenes to convince Lorenzen and Johnson to race at least once more. He worked out an arrangement for Chrysler to return with its stars. He allowed Turner to race.
Petty would win the pole and lead the first 45 laps before Marvin Panch, in the Wood Brothers No.21, took the lead. Bobby Issac, Jim Paschal, Johnson and young Cale Yarborough all led before Turner passed Yarborough with 26 laps to go on the way to his last win as a stock-car racer.
Every leader that day would end up in the stock-car racing Hall of Fame. The sport was saved.
Rockingham was the host of 78 NASCAR races, some of the best we'll ever see. Across its lifetime, the state lost all its events except those in Charlotte. The economic impact should've been enough to alert political leaders. The psychological impact should've been enough to alarm the sport's sanctioning body which owes its soul to North Carolina.
The sale of North Carolina Motor Speedway is now on the schedule. NASCAR sold its soul a long time ago.
NOT from Darlington, Rockingham, Martinsville or any other track with great racing like those tracks have. 
