The 1990 Hanes Activewear 500 was the eighth stock car race of the 1990 NASCAR Winston Cup Series season and the 41st iteration of the event. The race was held on Sunday, April 30, 1990, before an audience of 43,500 in Martinsville, Virginia at Martinsville Speedway, a 0.526 miles (0.847 km) permanent oval-shaped short track. The race took the scheduled 500 laps to complete. At race's end, Junior Johnson & Associates driver Geoff Bodine would manage to dominate the late stages of the race to take his eighth career NASCAR Winston Cup Series victory and his first victory of the season.^[1][2][3][4] To fill out the top three, Blue Max Racing driver Rusty Wallace and Bud Moore Engineering driver Morgan Shepherd would finish second and third, respectively.

Martinsville Speedway is an NASCAR-owned stock car racing track located in Henry County, in Ridgeway, Virginia, just to the south of Martinsville. At 0.526 miles (0.847 km) in length, it is the shortest track in the NASCAR Cup Series. The track was also one of the first paved oval tracks in NASCAR, being built in 1947 by H. Clay Earles. It is also the only remaining race track that has been on the NASCAR circuit from its beginning in 1948.

Qualifying was split into two rounds. The first round was held on Friday, April 27, at 3:00 PM EST. Each driver would have one lap to set a time. During the first round, the top 20 drivers in the round would be guaranteed a starting spot in the race. If a driver was not able to guarantee a spot in the first round, they had the option to scrub their time from the first round and try and run a faster lap time in a second round qualifying run, held on Saturday, April 28, at 12:30 PM EST. As with the first round, each driver would have one lap to set a time. For this specific race, positions 21-30 would be decided on time,^[5] and depending on who needed it, a select amount of positions were given to cars who had not otherwise qualified but were high enough in owner's points; up to two were given.

Geoff Bodine, driving for Junior Johnson & Associates, would win the pole, setting a time of 20.644 and an average speed of 91.726 miles per hour (147.619 km/h) in the first round.^[6][7]

No drivers would fail to qualify.