1988 Oakwood Homes 500

The 1988 Oakwood Homes 500 was the 25th stock car race of the 1988 NASCAR Winston Cup Series season and the 29th iteration of the event. The race was held on Sunday, October 9, 1988, before an audience of 145,000 in Concord, North Carolina, at Charlotte Motor Speedway, a 1.5 miles (2.4 km) permanent quad-oval. The race took the scheduled 334 laps to complete. Coming back from a two-lap deficit, Blue Max Racing's Rusty Wallace managed to defend a challenge from Hendrick Motorsports' Darrell Waltrip in the closing laps of the race to take his seventh career NASCAR Winston Cup Series victory and his third victory of the season. To fill out the top three, the aforementioned Darrell Waltrip and Bud Moore Engineering's Brett Bodine finished second and third, respectively.

Background
Charlotte Motor Speedway is a motorsports complex located in Concord, North Carolina, United States 13 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina. The complex features a 1.5 miles (2.4 km) quad oval track that hosts NASCAR racing including the prestigious Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day weekend and the NEXTEL All-Star Challenge, as well as the UAW-GM Quality 500. The speedway was built in 1959 by Bruton Smith and is considered the home track for NASCAR with many race teams located in the Charlotte area. The track is owned and operated by Speedway Motorsports Inc. (SMI) with Marcus G. Smith (son of Bruton Smith) as track president.

Entry list

 * (R) denotes rookie driver.

Qualifying
Qualifying was split into two rounds. The first round was held on Wednesday, October 5, at 3:00 PM EST. Each driver had one lap to set a time. During the first round, the top 20 drivers in the round would be guaranteed a starting spot in the race. If a driver was not able to guarantee a spot in the first round, they had the option to scrub their time from the first round and try and run a faster lap time in a second round qualifying run, held on Thursday, October 6, at 2:00 PM EST. As with the first round, each driver had one lap to set a time. For this specific race, positions 21-40 was decided on time, and depending on who needed it, a select amount of positions were given to cars who had not otherwise qualified but were high enough in owner's points; up to two were given.

Alan Kulwicki, driving for his own AK Racing team, managed to win the pole, setting a time of 30.700 and an average speed of 175.896 mph in the first round.

24 drivers failed to qualify.

Standings after the race

 * Drivers' Championship standings
 * Note: Only the first 10 positions are included for the driver standings.