Thirty-Nine Years in Pigeon Forge, Then a Left Turn Onto McCrary Road
If you live anywhere near Mt. Juliet and you notice an unusual number of chopped coupes, candy-painted roadsters and immaculate tri-five Chevys idling east on I-40 this week, there is a simple explanation. The Triple Crown of Rodding rolls into Nashville Superspeedway on Friday and Saturday, September 11 and 12, and for two days the infield apron of a mile-and-a-third concrete oval in Lebanon becomes one of the largest gatherings of finished American hot rods in the country.
The show is newer to Wilson County than it looks. For thirty-nine years it lived in Pigeon Forge under a different name — Shades of the Past — and became, over four decades, one of those events that people planned vacations around. In 2023 it was rebuilt and renamed as the Triple Crown of Rodding and moved west to the Superspeedway, carrying a forty-year legacy with it. That first Wilson County edition drew roughly 3,000 entries and 116 commercial exhibitors, and a national travel list named it one of the ten must-attend events of that year. This weekend is the fourth running at the track.
The name is not decoration. The “triple crown” refers to three separate championship categories judged across the weekend — Hot Rods, Street Rods and Custom Rods — which is a meaningful distinction if you have ever watched two owners argue about which of those three a particular car actually is. A hot rod is stripped and built for speed. A street rod is a pre-1949 car rebuilt for the road. A custom is a car reshaped as a design object, chopped and leaded and frenched until the factory would not recognize it. Judging all three under one roof is what gives the weekend its unusual density: you are not looking at one aesthetic repeated four hundred times, you are looking at three arguments about what an old American car is for, parked side by side.
What to know before you go
The venue is Nashville Superspeedway, 4847-F McCrary Road, Lebanon — about thirteen miles from downtown Mt. Juliet, which makes this one of the closest large-scale motorsports events Wilson County gets all year. Gates run 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Friday morning opens the entry tunnel to pre-registered participants while vendors and exhibitors set up, so Friday tends to be the quieter, more conversational day — the one where owners are still wiping down fenders and are happy to tell you what is under the hood. Saturday at 8 a.m. all event areas open, on-site registration stays available through noon, and a 50/50 raffle runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Two practical notes for locals. First, the setup days were Wednesday and Thursday, which means a fair number of trailers and haulers have already been moving through the McCrary Road corridor — expect slower going near the track entrance Friday morning. Second, this is an outdoor asphalt event in September in Middle Tennessee. The apron holds heat. Water, a hat and shoes you can stand in for six hours are not optional, and the shade is whatever the vendor canopies are willing to share.
Entry information, participant registration and the current schedule are posted by the organizers at triplecrownofrodding.com.
There is a broader point buried in the logistics. Wilson County spent years being described as the place people drove through on the way to somewhere else. A forty-year-old institution deciding to relocate here — and then staying for a fourth year — is the kind of quiet vote of confidence that does not make the front page but shows up in hotel occupancy, restaurant covers and the number of out-of-state plates in the Providence parking lot on a Saturday night. The track has spent the last few years accumulating exactly this sort of thing. It adds up.
More on what is being built and booked around Mt. Juliet: the full guide to what is actually going up at Golden Bear Gateway, and the long-awaited money for the Lebanon Road widening.
