Love at first sight, NASCAR style: The couple who got married at the race track in the world’s most redneck wedding

By Jennifer Madison
Updated:

She may not have looked like Kate Middleton walking down the aisle in a wedding veil from Wal-Mart, but newlywed Linda Ward will tell you her wedding day was nothing short of perfection.

Ward and her husband Greg Waters exchanged vows at the Charlotte Motor Speedway on Friday in a ceremony that created such a media frenzy it was dubbed the Royal Race Wedding. 

The nuptials came 12 months to the day the couple met on the NASCAR campgrounds in North Carolina.

Happy couple: Greg Waters and his bride, Linda Ward, listen to Kenny Chesney's Me and You, during their wedding at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina

Happy couple: Greg Waters and his bride, Linda Ward, listen to Kenny Chesney's Me and You, during their wedding at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina

The bride, a nurse at the Iredell County Jail, walked down the aisle at the track's Peninsula Campground wearing an embroidered sundress purchased at a Cherokee, North Carolina souvenir shop.

Her groom, a truck driver from Virginia, was casual in shorts and a tan T-shirt.

She told the Charlotte Observer: 'It's everything I imagined.'

But as press and descended onto the campgrounds to cover the nuptials, interest grew. Passers-by also gathered to watch and track officials were forced to send a security guard for crowd control, the Observer reported.

The groom admitted he was surprised by the mass interest in his race track wedding, which made him feel like a local celebrity.

'Getting married at the campground kind of felt weird at first. But we kind of feel famous,' he said.

Bride-to-be: Scott Kellogg escorts his mother, Linda Ward, to the ceremony, dubbed the Royal Race Wedding

Bride-to-be: Scott Kellogg escorts his mother, Linda Ward, to the ceremony, dubbed the Royal Race Wedding

The event was welcomed by speedway officials, who gave the couple pit passes to tomorrow's Coca-Cola 600 as a wedding gift.

Spokesman Scott Cooper said many weddings have taken place at  Speedway Club.

Few, however, have been held on the campgrounds - where NASCAR fans park their campers for Race Week every year.

The bride and groom were camping opposite each other last year, when he offered to help her carry some jugs of water back to her camp site.

She initially snubbed his advances but soon after the pair began a long-distance relationship - and he proposed.

'I told him: "I can carry my own damn water and I don't need no man's help,"' she recalled. 'Then I walked off,' she recalled.

NASCAR wedding: The Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina - near the campground where the bride and groom exchanged vows

NASCAR wedding: The Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina - near the campground where the bride and groom exchanged vows

It made perfect sense, she said, they get married where they met, since their friends and family were already attending the races this week.

Members of the Full Life Foursquare Church in Concor helped to make it all happen, by transforming the hospitality tent into a chapel, decorated with streamers and shrubs.

The bride was escorted through the campground by her son, Scott Kellogg, while Waylon Jennings' Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys played over speakers on the campground.

Keeping in theme, a chocolate groom's cake was even baked in the shape of Kyle Busch's number 18 NASCAR - the groom's favourite driver and his bride's least.

The nine-minute ceremony commenced with a truck of bikini-clad girls driving by, waving and yelling congratulations to the couple, who drove off in a decorated golf cart around the campgrounds, where they will also spend their honeymoon this weekend.

Both the bride and the groom will return to work next week until they determine how to make the long-distance romance work.

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