Ah, the Charlotte Motor Speedway roval. So weird, so challenging, so divisive -- and it has yet to host a lap of actual racing.

As unique as the 17-turn, 2-point-something-mile road course/oval hybrid might be, it isn't alone. Since NASCAR's first "Strictly Stock" season in 1949, the series now known as Monster Energy Cup has raced on 172 different racetracks, from fairgrounds and rodeo grounds to speedromes. Asphalt, concrete, dirt, gravel, ash, sand -- if it's been of the earth, then NASCAR has raced on it somewhere. That includes seawater.

In honor of this weekend's roval race, here's a look at the top five most unique facilities to host stock car racing's biggest stars and their cars.

5. Darlington Raceway, 1950-present, 155 races

When Harold Brasington returned home to South Carolina after attending his first Indy 500, he went full "Field of Dreams," plowing his way through farmland to construct a superspeedway in the literal middle of nowhere. Because of a local farmer's minnow pond located one corner of the property, Brasington was forced to pinch two turns of his oval a smidge tighter than the others. So, instead of mimicking the geometrically perfect 2.5-mile symmetry of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Brasington created a 1.25-mile egg that was eventually reconfigured into an even weirder 1.375 miles and is now 1.366 miles. Pocono Raceway and it's triangular ways might be today's strangest "oval," but Darlington was the O.G. when it comes to misshapenness.

4. McCormick Field, 1958, 1 race

It's not entirely unusual for stock car races to be held in a facility that wasn't built for their sport -- from Dog Track Speedway in Moyock, North Carolina, to Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears. But nowhere was a racetrack more shoehorned into an existing sports facility like it was at Asheville, North Carolina's McCormick Field, one of the America's most storied minor league ballparks. Opened in 1924, the only stretch of time when the stadium didn't house its beloved Asheville Tourists (1949-59), a super-cozy quarter-mile asphalt oval was built atop the baseball infield once occupied by the likes of Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. "It was more of a demolition derby than it was racing," recalls NASCAR Hall of Famer Jack Ingram, who took his future wife to a race at McCormick for their first date. On July 12, 1958, a field of 15 Grand National cars ran a 150-lap event, including five future Hall of Famers. Jim Paschal (who should be in the Hall one day) won the race, but it was Lee Petty who won the headlines after losing control of his '57 Oldsmobile and crashing it into the third base dugout. "I saw guys flip cars into the dugouts, the backstop and the outfield wall," Ingram said. Baseball returned in 1960 and the track was torn out, but as late as the mid-1990s, chunks of the demolished asphalt could still be found thrown into the woods outside the stadium.

3. Linden Airport, 1954, 1 race

Located 10 miles south of Newark, right off the New Jersey Turnpike, the Linden Airport and its runways hosted motorsports events from 1949 to 1954 and its only Grand National race on June 13, 1954. Eager to attract a full field, NASCAR lifted its family sedan limitations and allowed sports car to enter the race. The two-mile track incorporated sections of all four runways, creating seven turns, including two hairpins, one being particularly dicey at the end of the airport's longest two-runway "V". Al Keller of Buffalo, New York, won the race, his second win of the season and the final of his brief NASCAR career. He did so in a Jaguar, the only NASCAR Cup Series win for a foreign-branded car, until Kyle Busch won in a Toyota 54 years later. Shortly thereafter, Linden Airport went back to being an airport. It still is.

2. Daytona Beach & Road Course, 1949-58, 10 races

Anxious to bring excitement back to Daytona Beach after land speed record attempts moved west into the desert, local organizers devised a beach-road course that incorporated both the hard-packed sand of the World's Most Famous Beach and the rough-and-rumble two-lane Highway A-1-A. They were connected by a pair of too-tight turns that ran onto and off of the beach, two miles apart. Some version of that course hosted racing for more than a decade before NASCAR was founded in 1947. Big Bill France, who had raced on the beach, was in charge and took on the challenge of looking after nearly 40 competitors, while also watching for high tide (it would eat the cars), seagulls (they would attack the cars) and fans trying to sneak in over the dunes without paying (he placed "Beware snakes!" signs in those dunes). Meanwhile, fans in the makeshift grandstands had to look out for flying cars, many of which ended the day stacked up like kindling, having carried too much speed and tumbling over the sandy high-banked turns. "A race there would end and there'd be all these guys who started in a car standing around watching the finish," recalls Glen Wood, co-owner of Wood Brothers Racing and attendee of every Daytona Speedweeks since 1947. "Then they'd climb over the dune and stand there again, trying to figure out how they were going to get their car out of that pile and drive it home."

1. Langhorne Speedway, 1949-57, 17 races

Originally known as Philadelphia Speedway, this one-mile circle opened in 1926 and was included in NASCAR's inaugural Strictly Stock schedule. Wait, did that say circle? Yes, yes it did. Langhorne -- aka the Big Left Turn -- was a perfectly round dirt track with no straights. None. "You were never looking straight out the windshield, OK?" recalled Richard Petty, who never raced at "The 'Horne" himself, but as a kid watched his father, Lee, who won there in 1952. "There was a natural spring running under it somewhere, so the dirt was moving all the time. In the middle of a race, boom, there'd be a pothole there that wasn't there before." That was in Turns 1 and 2, a swampy, unpredictable mud bog that drivers affectionately referred to as Puke Hollow. Closed in 1971 and now covered by a suburban shopping center, the circle that claimed the lives of 27 will forever be remembered by its most notorious nickname -- the "Track That Ate The Heroes." Suddenly, a roval doesn't seem so bad, does it?