Perhaps the most famous automobile races in the world are run clockwise. The Grand Prix of Monaco--arguably the most legendary Formula 1 track--is clockwise. The most famous endurance race is the 24 hours of Le Mans, and it is run on the clockwise Circuit de la Sarte as well. If you want the other famous endurance track (that is also famous/infamous for other reasons), that'd be the Nurburgring. By this point you've guessed that it's clockwise too. If you want the other other famous endurance track that'd be the clockwise Sebring circuit. The other other other famous endurance track is Daytona, which ruins the clockwise streak by going the wrong way for my example. Other famous Formula 1 tracks are Albert Park in Australia, Brands Hatch and Donington Park and Silverstone in the UK, Fugi in Japan, Circuit Gilles Vileneuve in Canada, Monza in Italy--including the defunct oval superspeedway, Spa in Belgium, and Japans's Suzuka has been run in both directions. In the US there's also the (clockwise) Long Beach street course that was famous in CART (second in prestige only to the Indy 500, which is counterclockwise while the Indy road course is the opposite), and the Watkins Glen track is also clockwise (F1, Indy/CART, and Nascar all have raced there).

I'm not trying to prove you wrong here, /u/nikopol. I'm just pointing out some famous counter-examples. Why a great deal of racing is done counterclockwise is something I haven't studied.

There is lots of variation across sports in whether they use a sunwise or a widdershins directionality. A good example is horse racing which tends to be raced sunwise in Britain but widdershins in the United States.

However, the International Association of Athletics Federations, which runs the Athletics World Championships and governs the Athletics events at the Olympics, stipulates within their rules that all their races MUST be contested widdershins.

The reason for having a rule about directionality is pretty straight forward. The track has to be prepared prior to the race, positioning TV cameras and the spectators, setting up starting and finishing points etc, so it's just common sense to stick to one option across the board.

There's lots of theories as to why widdershins won out, ranging from it's historical pedigree going back to Roman Chariot races (although this isn't particularly convincing given how often sports events, including athletics, have been run sunwise instead.) Another more convincing theory is that since most people have right-limb dominance, in both their arms and legs, they run faster when going widdershins, which creates faster, more exciting race-times. Yet another theory says that it's more visually appealing in the straights to watch people running from left to right if you're from a culture that associates that with moving forward (this ties in with the direction in which we read text in English and other European languages.)

I don't think we necessarily need to draw on any scientific or historical explanation though, the IAAF only had two options to choose from so it was a 50/50 chance. Maybe they just flipped a coin.