Superspeedway

In North American motorsports, a Superspeedway is a racetrack over one mile in length. This term is used to differentiate these tracks from short tracks.

The firs superspeedway built for NASCAR racing was the one at Darlington, South Carolina, which is a mile and a half long and of a unique, asymetrical desing. The most famous superspeedway from a NASCAR standpoint is undoubtedly Daytona International Raceway in Daytona Beach, Florida, built as a replacement for a course which consisted of a drive down the town's main street and back up its famous beach.

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana is a superspeedway that existed far before the term was ever coined. Like Daytona, it is two and a half miles long, but its corners are less steeply banked, meaning that the stock cars used in NASCAR (which now races at both venues) attain somewhat lower speeds than they otherwise could there. This allows the NASCAR race at "Indy" to be run without the use of carburator restrictor plates like those used at Daytona and the NASCAR superspeedway at Talladega, Alabama, which is approximately two and two-thrids miles long.