The clock takes weeks to build. Hand-selected hardwood, hand-cut in a shop in Amherst County, Virginia. Internal movement assembled by people who understand what precision means when it isn't measured in lap times. Stained, finished, inspected. When they set it in victory lane at Martinsville Speedway, it stands taller than most of the children watching from the grandstands, and it weighs more than the trophy at any other track in professional motorsports.
H. Clay Earles started giving them out in 1964. Fred Lorenzen won the first one — swept both Martinsville races that year and led 980 of 1,000 laps. Richard Petty collected twelve. The tradition has outlived Earles, outlived the local company that originally built the clocks, and outlived the furniture industry that made Martinsville the kind of town where a grandfather clock was a natural thing to hand a race car driver. When Howard Miller announced in 2025 that it was ceasing production — tariffs on imported clock components made the business unsustainable — Dale Earnhardt Jr. said what every driver was thinking: don't mess this up.
Hermle North America, operating out of Amherst County, picked up the contract. They named the new clock after Earles himself. The tradition still stands. And the oldest continuously operating track in NASCAR still hands you a piece of furniture when you win.
Sixty Thousand Dollars and a Paperclip
The track opened September 7, 1947, on thirty acres near Ridgeway that H. Clay Earles had purchased a year earlier. Earles was a tobacco farmer's son from Axton, Virginia, and his original budget was ten thousand dollars. The final cost was sixty thousand — the kind of overage that either bankrupts a man or builds a legacy. Six thousand and thirteen paying customers showed up for the first race, plus another three thousand who watched from beyond the fences. The facility had seven hundred and fifty seats.
Red Byron won the fifty-lap Modified feature and took home five hundred dollars. The track had been marketed as "dust-free" — Earles had treated the dirt surface with oil — but by the end of the afternoon, every fan in their Sunday best was coated in red Virginia clay. Earles later said it looked like the dustiest place he'd ever seen.
He paved it in 1955. Bill France Sr. had already become involved, providing the track with advertising and drivers in exchange for a share of the profits, and by the time NASCAR incorporated the following year, Martinsville was woven into the organization's foundation. The track didn't turn a profit until its eighth year, but by then it was already part of something larger than one man's investment. Martinsville hosted a race in every single season of what would become the NASCAR Cup Series — 1949 to the present — and it is the only track in America that can say that.
Trail-Brake Physics on the Shortest Track in NASCAR
The shape is the thing. They call it the paperclip: two eight-hundred-foot straightaways connected by tight, hairpin turns banked at twelve degrees. The corners are four car-widths across. The straights are nearly flat. At half a mile and change — .526 miles, officially — Martinsville is the shortest track on the Cup Series schedule and the one that eats brake pads like no other facility in the sport.
You cannot aero your way through Martinsville. There is no drafting advantage, no speed-kills straightaway, no banking steep enough to carry you through the corner on momentum alone. You trail-brake into every turn, manage your tires through every run, and expect to get bumped by the car behind you because there is literally nowhere else for him to go. The racing is physical. The racing is personal. And every September, the Late Model Stock cars show up to run the same paperclip that the Cup cars run twice a year, under the same lights, for the same grandfather clock.
The ValleyStar 300: Three Tracks, One Verdict
The ValleyStar Credit Union 300 is the race. Two hundred laps of Late Model Stock cars on the shortest, tightest, most famous short track in America — preceded by three twenty-five-lap heat races and a last-chance qualifier. Martinsville first opened its gates to local stock cars in 1970, and the Late Model Stock feature has been part of the September weekend since 1985 — growing from a hundred-lap undercard to the crown jewel it is today. The event became the final leg of the Virginia Triple Crown in 2012, and that's when it became something more than a race. It became a verdict.
The Virginia Triple Crown starts at South Boston with the Thunder Road Harley-Davidson 200. It moves to Langley for the Hampton Heat. It ends here. Best average finish across three tracks. No points system. No gimmicks. You can win at South Boston, survive at Langley, and lose the whole thing at Martinsville because the paperclip punishes inconsistency the way a final exam punishes the student who only studied two chapters.
Peyton Sellers has five Virginia Triple Crown championships — 2013, 2014, 2018, 2022, and 2024. Five. No one else is close. He won the ValleyStar 300 itself in 2022, which means he's taken the race and the crown in the same season — the full sweep of everything Virginia short-track racing has to offer.
Lee Pulliam won the ValleyStar 300 twice — 2011 and 2014 — and took the VTC championship in 2015 and 2019. Then he came back to this same track on March 21, 2026, and ran the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series for the first time in his life. He led forty laps in a JR Motorsports car, survived a nineteen-car wreck, and finished fifth. He was thirty-seven years old and nearly in tears on pit road afterward. The short track that gave him the grandfather clock in his living room gave him his shot at the next level.
Carson Kvapil won the 2024 running — the same Kvapil who runs the No. 1 for JR Motorsports in the O'Reilly Series. Josh Berry — who won the Bobby Isaac Memorial twice at Hickory before anyone handed him a clock — led all two hundred laps in 2019, set a track record in qualifying, and took his clock home to Mooresville. The winners list reads like a pipeline roster: the drivers who proved it here went somewhere.
The Champions Who Wanted the Clock
Connor Hall grew up wanting a grandfather clock. Every Virginia racer does. The clock is the thing that separates "I won a race" from "I won at Martinsville."
Hall won the 2025 Virginia Triple Crown — first at South Boston, second at Langley, eleventh at Martinsville, for an average finish of 4.66. He took the championship. He did not take the clock. The ValleyStar 300 winner gets the grandfather clock as a race prize. The VTC champion gets the title and a share of the purse. Hall got the title. The clock is still out there.
He said afterward what every driver from Hampton to Danville understands: "Growing up a Virginia native, I grew up watching guys like Philip Morris and Lee Pulliam. To be here with JR Motorsports and come away with the Virginia Triple Crown is huge." But he also knows that the clock — the actual, physical, cherry-wood clock that Hermle builds in Amherst County — is the one piece of Martinsville he hasn't taken home yet.
The Oldest Track Still Running
Martinsville is more than sixty thousand seats arranged around a half-mile paperclip in a town that used to make furniture and sweatshirts and now makes grandfather clocks for race car drivers. Clay Campbell, Earles' grandson, runs the place — the longest-serving track president in NASCAR. The hot dogs are a tradition older than most of the drivers. The Cup Series comes twice a year — spring and fall — and fills every seat. The Late Model Stock cars come once, in September, and the field is deeper and hungrier than any weekly show in the country because this is Martinsville and the clock is real.
The track has survived seventy-nine years, the decline of the furniture industry, a surface that had to be repaved in 2004 after concrete broke apart during a race, a clock manufacturer that shut down, and the constant gravitational pull of superspeedways and cookie-cutter ovals that killed North Wilkesboro and tried to make short-track racing irrelevant. It survived because the paperclip is honest. Twelve degrees of banking. Four car-widths in the corners. No hiding.
H. Clay Earles spent sixty thousand dollars on thirty acres and a theory. Seventy-nine years later, the clock is still ticking, the cherry wood is still being cut, and the only thing that's changed is who builds it. The tradition outlived the man. The track outlived the industry. And every September, some driver who grew up dreaming about Martinsville gets to carry a piece of furniture to his truck and drive home knowing he earned it the hard way — two hundred laps on the shortest track in NASCAR, where the asphalt remembers everybody who tried and the clock only goes to one.