The 2024 edition of Daytona International Speedway’s Welcome to Rockville music festival was a massively-attended source of celebration and community over the weekend. The event, put on by Danny Wimmer Presents, reportedly had a record crowd of over 200,000 attendees.
The reason for the mass gathering of rock and metal fans isn’t hard to see – the event featured some of the biggest names in the genre. Just to name a few, the festival featured performances from the Foo Fighters, Motley Crue, Judas Priest, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, and more. The other scheduled bands numbered in the dozens, with each performance drawing a robust attendance across the facility’s several stages.
The Foo Fighters had a particularly viral moment in their performance. Singer/guitarist Dave Grohl told fans he was about to perform a guitar solo, and proceeded to rip a note-for-note-perfect rendition of Van Halen’s torrential 1978 track ‘Eruption’. Just as the cheers reached their peak, the big screen revealed that the playing was actually coming from Wolfgang Van Halen backstage – the son of the legendary Eddie Van Halen who performed ‘Eruption’ originally.
The event also brought heavy traffic to businesses both set up as vendors within the speedway and located in the immediate vicinity. The hundreds of thousands in attendance ate, shopped, stayed in hotels, and spent time around Daytona Beach. The impact to the local economy is hard to gauge precisely, but is no doubt a boost to businesses around the speedway.
Chris Gollon is a Flagler County resident since 2004, as well as a staple of the local independent music scene and avid observer of Central Florida politics, arts, and recreation.
