You’ve never seen a cookout this big.

Orangeburg-based Southern Cookers will unveil what it believes is the largest grill built in this nation on May 22.

The quarter-mile charcoal grill will make its debut at the “Coca-Cola Quarter-mile Cookout” at the 50th running of the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C.

The grill will be hauled in 8-foot sections and will be placed on the racetrack’s front stretch and pit road. The grill is expected to take six hours to put together.

“It is the longest grill to ever be built in the nation — as far as we can find,” Southern Cookers owner Sam Watford said.

The oval grill is about four football lengths, has 175 sections, can hold 7,000 pounds of charcoal and requires 175 chefs to operate.

Watford said NASCAR officials called him after visiting the Southern Cookers Web site, which proudly proclaims: “If you can draw it, we can build it.”

“Once we arrived at what size they wanted it to be, it would be a matter of figuring out how to do it,” Watford said. “It is always a challenge, especially with this one being an oval. Steel likes to stay in a straight line. We were able to run some computer drawings and figured it all out.”

The construction of the grill began about a month ago and has required the use of three full-time employees, as well as part-time employees. An estimated 300 man-hours have been spent on the project.

Watford said, “It is not the most expensive one we have ever built, but it is the longest. It has been an interesting project. There is nobody to call to get assistance because you are doing something that has never been done before.”

Watford, who opened Southern Cookers about nine years, says when he first started making grills in his backyard 12 years ago, he would never have dreamed of making a quarter-mile grill.

But he has since learned that anything is possible.

“If somebody wants it, we will do it,” he said. “As long as they want it to go!”

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