For the past two decades, anyone wanting to watch a historic NASCAR race was best off looking for a video of a VHS tape of a decades-old broadcast uploaded directly to YouTube. That changed this week, with NASCAR uploading a massive archive of over 1000 official broadcasts and condensed races to a new NASCAR classics website.
The archive starts with the 1951 race at Daytona Beach and continues all the way through to last month's Cup Series race at Richmond. In total, the series says that it includes most of the top-level races sanctioned by the series ever broadcast. That comes out to thousands of hours of historic and recent stock car racing, spanning from an era of regional dirt races run by owner-driver Lee Petty to races run this season, the first in series history without the Petty team name on the grid.
NASCAR says that this will be a rolling archive, updated within weeks of every recent Cup Series race. Broadcasts are ad-free, sortable by both era and track, and come with an embedded timeline of highlights for easier navigation. Worth noting, however, that some of the early races aren't complete. They're just highlight reels.
In addition to the full historic archive, the site launches with a 75-race collection of NASCAR's greatest-ever races. That list starts in 1951 and stretches to 2022, capped off with Ross Chastain's instant-classic wall ride move at Martinsville last season. Three other races from the 2022 season make the list, which naturally skews toward the Eighties-and-later era of full-length live broadcasts.
