‘It’s racing!’ Fans pack Charlotte Motor Speedway campground days ahead of Coca-Cola 600
CONCORD, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — It takes a special kind of dedication for fans to brave weather, crowds, and unknown possibilities for race day at Charlotte Motor Speedway, but that dedication runs deeper for hundreds of families who crowded the campgrounds outside the speedway days before Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600.
Thursday afternoon, Queen City News cameras captured the steady flow of RVs and campers filling the campground fields to pick some of the last few spots available.
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For most of these families, this is a tradition they choose to travel hundreds — if not thousands — of miles to continue.
Alan Hinds and his son, Steven, had their spot secured Wednesday evening when they drove down from Pennsylvania.
Attached to their campers were wooden “street-like” signs they made decades ago,
“We’re not here to watch the crashes and that sort of thing,” Alan Hinds said. “We’d just like to see good, clean, hard racing.”
Other families were among them, continuing their traditions.
Darlen Therrien and her family not only showed up to the same spot they have settled in for the past 12 years, but she was waiting to catch up and share food with friends she meets at the race track every year.
“We just love to meet new people and bond over this shared loved of a sport unlike any other,” she explained.
Some of those friends, in the past, have traveled as far as New Zealand.
When asked why brave heavy rains, winds, and heat, along with crowds of people, Therrien responded the only way she knew how.
“It’s racing! We do it because we love racing!”
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