Tourism officials in the Keystone State like to bill Pennsylvania as "The Great American Getaway."

To help the cause, they've slapped that slogan on this week's NASCAR Cup Series race at Pocono Raceway, located in the middle of the Appalachian Mountain range. If nothing else, Pocono puts the away in getaway — the host town is home to about 7,000 folks.

For many Americans, the beautiful Pocono Mountains have long been a popular vacation destination. For race fans, Pocono conjures images of a unique speedway layout — the "Tricky Triangle" — so let's learn a little about the place.

∎ OK, first the details. Pocono Raceway stretches to 2.5 miles but doesn’t allow the speeds of Daytona and the slightly longer Talladega due to its lack of high banking in the turns. The “tricky” aspect of Pocono comes from those three turns, which are banked at different degrees — 14, 8 and 6.

∎ Track designer Rodger Ward modeled the turns after three famous IndyCar tracks — Turn 1 after Trenton, Turn 2 after Indianapolis, Turn 3 after Milwaukee.

∎  Pocono Raceway remains an outlier in auto racing: A family-owned track, independent of American auto racing’s two major track proprietors — Daytona Beach-based NASCAR and Charlotte-based Speedway Motorsports. Founder and longtime operator Joe Mattioli, late in life, put the track in a family trust and the current ownership group is known as Mattco Inc.

∎ Mattioli, a former dentist, hosted both NASCAR and IndyCar events at Pocono starting in the early to mid-1970s. He was good friends with a pair of racing heavyweights — Indy’s Tony Hulman and NASCAR founder Bill France Sr.

∎ Mattioli always credited Big Bill for convincing him to “hang in there” when financial strains came along in the late-’70s. The two men met in New York to discuss matters, and France pulled out a business card and scribbled his favorite poem on the back. It was a slightly paraphrased version of George W. Cecil’s work: “On the plains of hesitation lie the bleached bones of millions who, when within the grasp of victory, sat and waited, and waiting died.”

∎ Pocono has been on NASCAR’s Cup Schedule since 1974. Richard Petty (who else?) won the first Pocono race by 18 seconds over Buddy Baker.  From 1981-2022, it was host to two annual races. Indy-style cars, under three different sanctioning bodies, raced there from 1971 to 2019, with some gaps in that time frame. Mark Donohue won the inaugural IndyCar race there.

∎ The track is located in the Pocono Mountains, naturally, in the small town of Long Pond, Pennsylvania. The nearest city of size is Scranton, a half hour to the north. But it’s only about 90 minutes east to Manhattan.

∎ The ARCA Series ran 70 Pocono races between 1983-2023 (twice a year from 1988-2019), but a lack of race sponsorship kept Pocono off the 2024 ARCA schedule. Look at the current Cup racers who won ARCA races at Pocono: Michael McDowell, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Joey Logano, Ty Dillon, Chase Elliott, Corey LaJoie, Kyle Larson, Chase Briscoe, Justin Haley, Harrison Burton, Ty Gibbs.

∎ Bob Keselowski, Brad’s late dad, was an ARCA Series champ who won 24 career races in the 1980-90s. Five of those came at Pocono.

∎ In 1972, the fledgling track was the site of “Concert 10,” billed as a Woodstock-style event featuring Edgar Winter, Three Dog Night, the J. Geils Band and others. Scheduled to run from 1 to 11 p.m., heavy rain pushed back the schedule and things didn’t wind down until the next morning at 8:45. The crowd was estimated at 200,000 and Joe Mattioli, overwhelmed by it all, exited the rock-promotion game.

∎ But Pocono Raceway wasn’t done with music. The next year, as host of the Pocono State Fair, its music stage was graced by a wide variety of the American soundtrack: Johnny Cash, Mac Davis, the Jackson Five, Helen Reddy, Sammy Davis Jr, Freda Payne and Buck Owens, as well as Bob Hope.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR, Pocono go way back; same with Buck Owens and Edgar Winter