Pocono’s ongoing NASCAR bond was forged as a race for Philadelphia and New York fans

Nick Igdalsky knew the day would come when NASCAR would take away one of the two Cup races held every summer at Pocono Raceway, the quirky, 2½-mile track in Long Pond that his feisty and indefatigable grandfather had carved out of an old spinach farm in the mountains.

NASCAR announced last September that it had handed Pocono’s other date to a racetrack near St. Louis. So, for the first year since 1981, Pocono will play host to just one top-series stock-car race, the M&M’s Fan Appreciation 400. That race is this Sunday.

“For decades, we have been partners with NASCAR and the France family,” says the 44-year-old Igdalsky, who grew up working at the racetrack and is now its CEO. “I have always stated that we will do whatever is necessary to help the sport progress.”

Igdalsky’s grandfather, Joseph R. Mattioli Jr., the former Northeast Philadelphia dentist known to all as “Doc,” died 10 years ago at age 86. Doc died 20 years after the death of series founder Bill (or “Big Bill”) France, who persuaded Doc 40 years ago to stage two yearly races at Pocono — with the help, we shall see, of a handwritten message from France to Mattioli.

Pocono is a highly unusual track in that it is shaped like a triangle, not an oval, and has much flatter corners than a high-banked, stock-car speed bowl. NASCAR drivers have never been crazy about racing there, especially when Cup races were 500 miles, and took four-plus hours. (Doc often grumbled that he’d cut ticket prices 20% if races were slashed by 100 miles.)

It turned out that the two Pocono top-series races, often held about six weeks apart, were trimmed to 400 miles after Doc died, anyway. For the last two years, NASCAR held two Cup races at Pocono in a single weekend — the first race 325 miles, the second 350 miles.

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As Igdalsky puts it, “Fans loved the double format, but it posed unique challenges for the industry.”

One of the Pocono races was shipped to World Wide Technology Raceway in Madison, Ill. A complete sellout for this year’s Cup race at Pocono is not expected, but Igdalsky says, “This will definitely be the best attendance for a Pocono race in some time.”

So Pocono lives on as a topflight stock-car track, just as Doc Mattioli and Big Bill France would have wanted. The heavy investment in the racetrack by Doc and his wife, Rose, a podiatrist who died in 2020, certainly paid off for the Mattioli family.

And yet, the family racing empire might have vanished four decades ago were it not for a meeting in New York between Big Bill France and the Mattiolis — a meeting that is memorialized with a business card that still hangs in the main office at the racetrack.

It is the business card of William H.G. France, the president of International Speedway Corp. in Daytona Beach, Fla. What Big Bill France scribbled on the back of that card helped to persuade Doc and Rose Mattioli, then scuffling financially, to hold onto their racetrack.

Paraphrasing a passage first written by George W. Cecil in the March 1923 edition of The American Magazine and later popularized by the politician Adlai E. Stevenson, France wrote:

“ON THE PLAINS OF HESITATION Lie the Bleached Bones of millions, who when within the Grasp of victory, SAT and Waited And Waiting Died.”

As Doc Mattioli later told writer Joe Miegocfor the 2011 book, Pocono: NASCAR’s Northern Invasion, “I read it, thought for a minute, then told him, ‘OK, you S.O.B., I’ll go with you.’ From that minute on, they were behind me 100 percent.”

NASCAR had raced at other tracks in the Northeast since France founded the circuit in 1948 — including Langhorne Speedway in Bucks County, a circle with a perilous downhill stretch known as “Puke Hollow.” But Pocono was a new superspeedway in a superb location.

The track is two hours north of Philadelphia and two hours west of New York, close to the intersection of I-80, beelining west from Manhattan, and zipping up from Philadelphia on the Pa. Turnpike’s Northeast Extension (I-476).

A New York Times article on Nov. 29, 1970, pointed out that 40 million people lived within 200 miles of Pocono — an area underserved by stock-car racing. What Big Bill France really wanted was a stock-car track in or near New York, but Pocono would be his launch point.

Doc Mattioli, who grew up in nearby Old Forge, Pa., and had invested in Poconos real estate, actually envisioned the track as an Indianapolis Motor Speedway of the East, tailored for the low-slung, open-wheel Indy cars, with long straightaways and flat banking.

The first U.S. Auto Club IndyCar race, the Schaefer 500, did rather well at Pocono on July 3, 1971, drawing a crowd estimated at 75,000 by The Inquirer. The 1978 Schaefer 500 drew 110,000, a record, though USAC criticized the track for being too bumpy in spots.

NASCAR began holding one Cup race a year there in 1974. The stock cars first drew smaller crowds than the Indy cars. The 1978 NASCAR Coca-Cola 500 at Pocono drew 70,000, but that was nearly double the 39,000 at the track’s first NASCAR race, won by Richard Petty.

Then came trouble, and not on the stock-car side. USAC got into a civil war with Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), a rival series. Mattioli took USAC’s side. Most drivers, including the legendary Mario Andretti, from nearby Nazareth, Pa., took CART’s side.

Schaefer departed as the race sponsor, and the 1979 IndyCar race, held on a chilly June afternoon during a gasoline crisis, drew only about 40,000.

“Tonight, I’m getting drunk, and then I’m going to war,” Mattioli, who had refinanced the track in 1972, told The Inquirer that day.

The 1980 USAC race drew 60,000, but the 1981 race, missing all but six CART drivers who skipped the race on CART’s orders, drew only 25,000 and was shortened by rain — an “aesthetic failure,” as an unsparing Rich Hofmann wrote in the Daily News the next day.

“Financially, it’s a disaster,” Mattioli told the Daily News. “I’m not pleased. In fact, I’m damn mad.”

According to the track’s history on its website (which could have been written by Doc), “We were almost bankrupt two or three times, but were too naïve to realize it.” Doc said he was selling. France summoned him to New York, scrawling the famous message on his card.

NASCAR handed Pocono a second Cup race in 1982 to replace one at the crumbling Texas World Speedway. The two summer Cup races, plus supporting races and activities, enabled Pocono to complete a 10-year, $30 million “renaissance.” Pocono prospered.

By 2003, as NASCAR surged in popularity, the two Cup races at Pocono drew a combined 230,000. Two IndyCar races would come and go, the second in 2019, but NASCAR had helped Pocono do the heavy lifting.

Pocono had also helped NASCAR, even though the France family never did get that racetrack in or near New York.

Popularity in NASCAR has dwindled in recent years, but Pocono still has a spot on the schedule. Even better, the Mattiolis still have a spot on the schedule. The staff roster still includes nine family members, including Doc and Rose’s two daughters.

As Nick Igdalsky said of his grandparents, “They left us with a legacy of taking care of people.”

Dave Caldwell lives in Manayunk and has covered dozens of NASCAR races at Pocono for The Inquirer and the New York Times.