UAW-GM 500 race week activities at Lowe’s Motor Speedway began Tuesday afternoon with what was called an “Extreme Tribute” concert to honor R.J. Reynolds Tobacco for its years of sponsoring NASCAR’s top series through its Winston brand.

Whatever your opinion of the talent lineup — which included ZZ Top, Hank Williams Jr., George Jones, Wayne Newton, Trace Adkins and Jimmy Wayne — it’s tough to criticize the concept of doing something to honor RJR for more than 30 years of contributions to stock-car racing.

“They really wrote the book on corporate sports marketing and plowed the field for everybody else,” said H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, president of Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

Lowe’s Motor Speedway eventually became the home for RJR’s annual all-star race, The Winston, which was held here in 1985, returned in 1987 and has been at the track ever since.

The famous story about The Winston, of course, is that in 1991 RJR’s president of sports marketing, the late T. Wayne Robertson, was considering the idea that still won’t die — moving the event to other tracks.

Wheeler took Jim Duncan and Ed Clark from his staff to a meeting in Winston-Salem and told Robertson that the track planned to put up lights and run the all-star race on Saturday night. That was news to Duncan and Clark, since the idea had never been discussed before that meeting, and Wheeler didn’t even know when he promised to make it happen that such a lighting project was feasible.

It was, of course, and Saturday’s UAW-GM 500 is scheduled to cap off a long weekend of night activities at the track.

Before Saturday night’s race, Richard Childress will drive a black No. 3 Chevrolet as a tribute to the late Dale Earnhardt, and Jeff Gordon will pilot a No. 24 Chevrolet as part of NASCAR’s “Victory Lap” tribute to Winston. As cool as that will be to see, it’s also true that the “Victory Lap” tributes to the Winston Cup champions haven’t exactly seized the imagination of the racing world.

Maybe that’s because it’s so hard to quantify what RJR has done for NASCAR’s top series. Perhaps the sport would have found another way to cut a path to the success it enjoys, but RJR’s contributions make it hard to imagine.

Granted, stock-car racing provided the company a place for it to spend its marketing dollars after cigarette advertising was banned from television. And it’s sadly true that the product those dollars were spent to promote has damaged the health of thousands and thousands of its users.

That, frankly, is the dark side to the story of the NASCAR-RJR relationship that will end after this year.