NEWTON, Iowa (AP) — It wasn’t too long ago that Iowa Speedway designer and part-owner Rusty Wallace was pleading with NASCAR officials for a Camping World Truck Series race.

Wallace doesn’t have to beg anymore.

The three-year-old Iowa track not only got its first NASCAR truck race, set for Sept. 5, it also landed a Nationwide series race that will make its debut Saturday. Add in the IRL’s Iowa 250, which has run to packed houses for three years and recently signed an extension through 2011, and the .875-mile oval carved out of a corn field has become one of the nation’s fastest growing tracks.

Though officials are thrilled about landing three major races in just their third full season, they know the speedway must prove it can pull off hosting a major race before even thinking about Sprint Cup.

“It’s our goal to put on the best Nationwide race of the year Saturday at Iowa Speedway,” Iowa Speedway president Jerry Jauron said. “Hopefully NASCAR sees that and sees what we’re getting done here, and it leads to bigger and better things down the road.”

Iowa has filled all its permanent seats for all three Iowa 250s, and temporary and standing-room only tickets pushed attendance for June’s IRL race past 40,000. Track officials have supplemented the 25,000 permanent seats with 30,000 temporary ones for Saturday, and they’ll assess if they’re ready to increase permanent seating after the 2009 season.

The track also has yet to lose a corporate sponsor this year, Jauron said, and it landed both NASCAR events after other venues bowed out.

Iowa got the Nationwide spot after NASCAR pulled out of Mexico City, and it landed the truck race after Mansfield Motorsports Park ran into financial woes.

The track itself, a short oval that drivers say runs like a super speedway, has drawn praise from the open wheel and stock car drivers that have run here.

“This place has some good amenities to it,” said driver Kyle Busch, who won a NASCAR Camping World Series East-West event in Iowa in May. “It might not have quite the grandstands it needs in order to accommodate a Cup race, it not might quite have the roads in and out in order to — for a traffic pattern. But that’s about all that I see that it lacks.”

The track draws much of its support from Des Moines, which has a population of about 200,000 and is about 30 miles west of Newton.

But the speedway’s in a market that’s stronger than it might look at first glance.

Dozens of smaller auto racing tracks are scattered across the state, and the Knoxville Raceway, home of the Knoxville Nationals sprint car championships and a thriving racing community, is just 30 miles south of Newton.

Many of those fans will make the trek to Newton, and officials expect a crowd of around 57,000 Saturday.

A major hurdle Iowa and other aspiring Sprint Cup venues face is finding an open date. The series has a well-established lineup that stretches from February to November with very few open weekends.

“To go out and ask for a Cup race, that’s a big statement because then, you have to pay a really big purse to get a Cup race. And can we put that many people in here, will they come? I don’t know,” Wallace said. “We might a good snapshot, what this particular race looks like, what the truck race looks like. And down the road, if the support is there, yeah, and if NASCAR wants to have a Cup race, we would entertain that for sure.”

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