The Vault
RICK GORAL’S TAKE ON BEING LUXEMBURG SPEEDWAY’S PROMOTER
Posted on: Friday June 10, 2022
Rick Goral (right) poses with fellow Luxemburg Speedway promoter Bobby Dorner (middle) and track announcer Joe Verdegan at the track’s 2011 season awards banquet. (danlewisphoto.net)
RICK GORAL
I Can Do This (from the 2017 release “Life In The Past Lane – The Next Generation”
It’s a little-known fact that Luxemburg Speedway promoter Rick Goral had his eye on promoting a pair of other racetracks in northeast Wisconsin before he took over at the Kewaunee County Fairgrounds in 2002. The Denmark native and lifetime race fan used to play “pretend race promoter” when he was a kid. He’d set up driver payouts, entry fees, expenses, and anything else related to running a racetrack.
“Even when I was a kid, I would make believe I was running a racetrack with these model cars I’d built,” Goral said. “As I got older, I tried crunching numbers with payoffs and other potential expenses and I thought, ‘I can do this.’ Goral went to school for accounting and ran a trophy and apparel business (Denmark Trophy Case), so running a business was not a foreign concept to him. Goral had attended races as a youth and into his early adult years at Luxemburg, but mainly at the Brown County Fairgrounds in De Pere. “I stopped going to the races weekly around 1974, but that picked up again in 1990,” Goral said. “Some of my family members – Mark, Doug, and Eric Mincheski – were racing at the Expo in Manitowoc on Saturday nights, and I decided to tag along. I was hooked again from that point forward.”
It was in the late 1990s when Goral began searching for a track to operate. The then-vacant 141 Speedway, a quarter-mile paved oval minutes south of his hometown, was for sale for $120,000. “I had looked at that and talked to the owner, Dick Grall, twice,” Goral said. “I remember Dick telling me stories of how he’d get 5,000 people there for races. I knew better. He was an odd duck. There was just no way I was paying that kind of money for 141 back then.”
What was strange for Goral is that the run-down track had sat idle for seven years, and all of a sudden there were two serious parties looking to purchase it: Goral and Madison Mid-American series stock car driver Matt Rowe. “As it turned out, Matt got it on a land contract,” Goral said. “I traveled to paved tracks at Wausau and Plover and met with Phil Bickley and Darrell Bassuener, and they clued me in on things I needed to know if I was going to get 141. I was serious about it.”
Goral went to work for Rowe as a pit steward at 141, and in the meantime, around 2000, Thunder Hill Raceway in Sturgeon Bay was up for bids as promoters Rick Ledvina and Carolyn Tordeur bowed out.
.“I put a bid in to run Sturgeon Bay and even got interviewed by the county board, but they went with the local, Tom Stark,” Goral recalled. After Tri-Star Promotions stepped down from operating the very successful Luxemburg Speedway, Goral got his chance. He partnered up with Luxemburg’s Bob Dorner and three silent partners. Their bid was accepted, and Goral stepped knee deep into the up-and-down world of being a race promoter in 2002. Goral received an eye-opener early on as to not only the time and effort it takes to put on a weekly show, but also the expenses.
“Employee payroll was pretty hefty, and things you don’t think about, like sales tax,” Goral said. “Between that, the monthly rent, advertising, workman’s comp insurance, the rescue squad, maintenance and fuel for the track prep vehicles, and other utilities and odds and ends can eat into your profits in a hurry.”
One of the keys to having a successful dirt track program is providing a smooth, dust-free racing surface so the fans don’t get choked with dust. Enter “The Trackmaster,” Bobby Marquis. “I grew up watching Bobby race at De Pere and I had a ton of respect for him,” said Goral. Marquis was arguably one of the most colorful characters who was on Goral’s payroll as the man responsible for preparing the clay oval for racing weekly.
“Bobby was pretty head-strong and stubborn,” Goral said. “He had his routine and his way of doing things, and nobody was going to tell him anything differently.”
IRA sprint car promoter Steve Sinclair found this out the hard way when Goral hosted the touring sprint car series. “Steve was trying to tell Bobby how he wanted the track prepped for his guys, and Bobby wasn’t hearing anything of the sort,” Goral said. “He did a great job for us and was always reliable. He’d show up during the week and work on the track.”
Marquis was said to sleep in his water truck. However, as Goral would describe it, Marquis became “more hyper” as the years marched on. One night, Marquis got upset with modified champion Brian Mullen. Mullen, who has always preferred a dry, slick racetrack over a wet, heavy track, voiced disapproval one night to Marquis over the track conditions.
The following week, Marquis, still upset with Mullen calling him out on his track conditions, backed his water truck into Mullen’s pit spot, opened the valve and flooded Mullen’s pit stall. He would make damn sure Mullen got the message his comments to “The Trackmaster” weren’t taken very well.
“Honestly, when he watered the track, I didn’t even want to watch because it scared the hell out of me,” Goral said of Marquis, who was known to put the big, heavy water track on two wheels more than once. “I was afraid he was going to get hurt.”
Race promoters wear all sorts of hats and are forced to put out a variety of “fires” on race day. That can include drivers and crew members exchanging dukes after altercations on the track. “The only driver I had to give a two-week suspension to was Charlie Kroll,” Goral said. Kroll was a veteran driver from Algoma who wasn’t afraid to mix it up both on and off the track with his fellow drivers. “One night in the claim area in the infield, Charlie shoved our IMCA inspector, Jay Flaig,” Goral explained. “When I sent Charlie the letter of suspension, he vowed to never come back. Lo and behold, two weeks after his suspension, Charlie was back racing with us.
“After the races, I was as at the bar at Augie’s and the place was packed. Charlie comes up to me and asks me if I wanted to drink a shot with him. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll have one.’ Then Charlie says to me, ‘Yeah, I deserved to get suspended for that.’”
In another altercation, Goral got summoned to the pit area. One of Kroll’s archrivals was Green Bay’s John Heinz. One of Heinz’s crew members, Al Umentum, went after Kroll while Kroll was still strapped into his race car with his helmet on. “Come to find out Charlie held Al on the ground and was stuffing handfuls of dirt and gravel into his mouth,” Goral said. “The security guys thought Charlie was punching Al. I told them basically, ‘There’s no way Charlie was punching Al. because you can still recognize his face.’”
One time, the Luxemburg police had to intervene with Kroll and Heinz. According to Goral, Heinz walked into Kroll’s trailer where an altercation ensued. “That night, I had Heinz and his crew come up to me. They wanted to press charges and all of this,” Goral said. “I asked the police officer to please go see what happened for me. He did, and when I asked the officer what happened, the officer basically told John he should have stayed out of Charlie’s trailer. That was the end of that, basically. I learned over the years that skirmishes in the pits usually get taken care of by other drivers.”
Some lessons Goral learned the hard way, such as securing sponsorship. “We had a potential sponsor who wanted to sponsor a mini-series of Fastrak late models one year,” Goral recalled. “He had already sponsored a lot of race cars in that class. I talked over the phone with this sponsor, and we agreed over the phone to $15,000 because I needed $3,000 per night for five late model shows. The sponsor agreed, and like most racing people, I was pretty confident we had a deal.”
Goral continued to host the Fastrak late models, but this sponsor never ante’d up the dough. “I’d place phone calls to him and invoices were mailed out, but we never once got a check cut nor would he return any phone calls,” Goral said. “We kept up our end of the deal and ran the races, but we got burnt on that one badly.”
Goral and Company decided to call it quits after the 2011 season. “Of the two main reasons we left, one was money,” Goral said. “I had asked Kewaunee County for a $200 per night reduction in our rent. They flat out refused, with basically no negotiations whatsoever.”
The other factor came as Goral and Dorner were taking laps around the track one day after the 2011 season. “The county was in the process of moving the pit area from turns three and four to behind corners one and two,” Goral said. “The place was all tore up when we were driving around the track. Bobby and I got talking. I think it was Bobby who said something like, ‘Do we really want to go through with this another year?’ We would have had to move the pits and our pit concession stand and everything else. We decided right then and there that we were done. We’d had enough.”
The venture was profitable some years, other years not so much. “That last year, we had actually had our biggest crowd ever. It was for a trailer race of destruction,” Goral said. “We had 2,600 people there. It was nights like that you needed to make up for the nights you lost money. We always seemed to lose money in August when car counts drop and football started up again. I can see now why (former Luxemburg track promoter) Kelly Hafeman wrapped things up around Labor Day weekend when he did.”
Goral said he’d most certainly tweak some things if he had to do it all over again. “I guess I’d focus more on the weekly program and have fewer big money specials,” Goral said. “I remember paying out $1,500-to-win IMCA stock car specials and getting like four or five new drivers show up. That’d be it. That extra money most nights doesn’t put more people in the stands. And the fall specials these tracks have, those are overdone, too. I wouldn’t do that, either. That’s too much financial risk.”
Promoting races took a toll on Goral’s health in the end. “Since I’ve gotten out of race promoting, I’ve had five different surgeries,” Goral said, noting ailments including a hip replacement, heart surgery, and liver cancer. “I don’t regret at all promoting the track all those years as it was fun overall. But financially looking back, it didn’t make sense to keep doing it. And these days I would not want to be a race promoter. They are much different times these days.”