Ceremony set for town's sidewalk salute to stars

Sunday, May. 10, 2009

MOORESVILLE, N.C. — The town known as Race City USA has a new and lasting attraction for motorsports fans: a “walk of fame” honoring many of the all-time greatest NASCAR drivers.

A Raleigh company recently installed 13 granite and terrazzo markers in downtown Mooresville that include portraits of drivers who have been inducted into the Mooresville-based N.C. Auto Racing Hall of Fame.

The sidewalk tributes span much of the 200 block of North Main Street in front of the Charles Mack Citizen Center.

Drivers include such legends as Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Ned Jarrett, David Pearson, Junior Johnson, Richard Petty, Bobby Allison and the late Dale Earnhardt. Their portraits are from images in museums in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Talladega, Ala.

Petty, Pearson, Earnhardt's daughter, Kelley Earnhardt, and many of the other drivers plan to greet fans at a ceremonial unveiling of the N.C. Auto Racing Walk of Fame at 2:30 p.m. May 20 outside the Citizen Center.

David Allen Co. of Raleigh, which designed and built the markers, installed them in two days, in plenty of time for the two big May races at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord. Thousands of fans flock to Mooresville during speedway race weeks to visit Dale Earnhardt Inc., Penske Racing, Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s JR Motorsports and other shops.

Motorsports is a $2.4 billion industry in the region, with about 80 percent of all NASCAR teams within a 50-mile radius of Charlotte. Mooresville has dozens of those teams and other motorsports-related businesses and came up with the Race City USA moniker years ago.

With racing so much at its core, what better place for the sidewalk tributes than Mooresville? said racing industry veteran John Dodson of Mooresville-based NASCAR Technical Institute.

Dodson dreamed up the Walk of Fame idea five years ago with Ron Johnson, chairman of the Mooresville Convention & Visitor's Bureau, which paid the overall $40,000 cost of the markers.

“If we're Race City USA, we need to be Race City USA,” said Dodson, whose father, Johnny, raced on the beaches of Daytona in the mid-1950s.

All 13 Hall of Fame inductees have driven in NASCAR, but Johnson said the Hall of Fame is dedicated to all N.C. motorsports, and inductees may one day come from drag racing and other motorsports. Whoever's inducted each October also will get a sidewalk marker, as organizers intend to keep adding them along North Main.

When Dodson mentioned the Walk of Fame idea to Richard Petty five years ago, “he thought it was great and told me, ‘If you don't do it, some other town will get it,' ” Dodson said.

Petty, the Hall of Fame's inaugural inductee in 1997, offered input, as did the overseers of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Dodson said.

But N.C. Auto Racing Walk of Fame organizers ditched the idea of stars. Each 40-inch-by-40-inch marker also includes two black-and-white checkered flag engravings, the number of each driver's car and the year they were inducted into the Hall. Since many of them had more than one car number in their careers, the drivers or their survivors selected the numbers for their markers.

“Racing, as we know it, all started here in North Carolina,” Johnson said. “As long as we can, we need to preserve the heritage of motorsports.”

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