The Atlanta 500 is a NASCAR Nextel Cup stock car race held at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia.

Atlanta Motor Speedway (formerly Atlanta International Raceway) is a superspeedway in Hampton, Georgia, twenty miles south of Atlanta. It is a 1.54-mile (2.48 km) quad-oval track with a seating capacity of over 125,000. It opened in 1960 as a 1.5 mile standard oval. In 1994, 46 condominiums were built over the northeastern side of the track. In 1997, to standardise the track with Speedway Motorsports' other two 1.5 mile ovals, the entire track was almost completely rebuilt. The frontstrech and backstrech were swapped, and the configuration of the track was changed from oval to quad-oval. The project made the track one of the fastest on the NASCAR circuit.

Other highlights of the facility are a quarter-mile track between the pit road and the main track for Legends racing and a 2.5-mile (4 km) FIA-approved road course. In 1994, the speedway hosted the Countryfest concert, attracting over 200,000 fans.

For most of the 1990s and 2000s, the track boasted the highest speeds on the NASCAR circuit, with a typical qualifying lap speed of about 193 mph (311 km/h) and a record lap speed of over 197 mph (317 km/h). In 2004 and 2005, the similarly designed Texas Motor Speedway saw slightly faster qualifying times, but as the tracks' respective racing surfaces have worn, qualifying speeds at Atlanta have again become consistently faster than at Texas (2005 and 2006). The circuit has two tracks, the longer Talladega Superspeedway and Daytona International Speedway, that were once much faster than Atlanta, with lap speeds usually exceeding 200 mph (322 km/h), but restrictor plates were mandated for use on those tracks in 1988 after Bobby Allison's violent crash at Talladega the year before, reducing average lap speeds to about 190 mph (306 km/h). NASCAR does not currently require restrictor plates at Atlanta, which helped lead to the adoption of the track's commercial slogan, "Real Racing. Real Fast."

In early September 2004, AMS found an unexpected use: as a shelter for evacuees from Florida fleeing Hurricane Frances. While there were no indoor facilities available, visitors waited out the extremely slow-moving storm parked in their recreational vehicles, after creeping along for hours in traffic on nearby Interstate 75.