The Vault
LUXEMBURG TRI-STAR SPEEDWAY & THE HAFEMAN’S
Posted on: Saturday November 7, 2020
DRIVER TURNED PROMOTER (pulled from ‘Life In The Past Lane – The Next Generation’)
Kewaunee County was in the market for a new racing promoter after the Luxemburg Speedway promoter defaulted following the 1988 season.
Kelly Hafeman and his wife, Debbie, had a genuine interest in promoting the third-mile clay oval. After all, Hafeman was a successful racer – a champion – in the relatively new IMCA modified division.
He and Debbie served as president and treasurer, respectively, for NEW DIRT, the club that operated the weekly Sunday night program at Seymour Speedway.
“Debbie had scored the races for Rick (Schlabowske), and I had gone out and sold advertising for Seymour,” recalled Hafeman. “Rick was a true promoter and he initially built a solid car count and fan base. We decided we’d take the
plunge and go for promoting it.”
While Kelly and Debbie knew very well the racing end of things, concessions was not their forte.
“I didn’t know hot dog buns and all of that, really, so we decided to call up Ralph Aschenbrenner,” said Kelly Hafeman. “Ralph ran the concessions for the Sunday night program at Seymour. We told him
what our plans were and Ralph was all in.”
The trio formed Tri-Star Promotions, and in 1989 embarked on a thirteen-year reign as promoters of Luxemburg Speedway.
“We were all one-third partners,” explained Hafeman. “We made a pitch to the county. To be honest, we had no money, very little experience, but a lot of ambition.”
One day before the season began, the trio was standing on the track, pointing out things to county officials that needed to be done before opening night. “I remember standing there and I told them we needed more clay, some fencing, and that we needed a stop and go light for the drivers,” Hafeman said. “I figured they had to have one laying around somewhere.”
Truth is there wasn’t one. In 1989, there wasn’t a traffic light to be found in Luxemburg.
“We had the first one ever in the village of Luxemburg,” he said, “and it was at the race track.”
While they had a very successful tenure, things didn’t start out all that rosy.
“Our first three shows were all rained out,” Hafeman said. “We were within an eyelash of going one way or another.”
The trio stood underneath the old wooden grandstand trying to stay dry and wondered what exactly had they gotten themselves into. The Tri-Star partners borrowed money out of their individual 401k accounts, scraped up enough cash, and had frozen enough hot dog buns to give it a whirl on week four.
“We had sunny weather and forty cars and eighty people, but it was enough to keep us going.”
The old grandstand, into which you could squeeze in maybe 1,500 people, soon was filled to capacity darn near every night. “We realized very early on that the old bleachers weren’t going to make it as our crowds were huge,” Hafeman explained.
The county built a new covered grandstand in 1995. Tri-Star pledged a dollar per ticket surcharge, which went to
Kewaunee County for debt retirement of the new structure. “Needless to say, that grandstand has likely been paid for many times over,” he said.
Times were a-changing on the local dirt scene in the 1990s. Gone were the days of one division (late models) on the three half-mile tracks at De Pere, Seymour and Shawano. De Pere was closed for good. Seymour had converted to a smaller, third-mile tri-oval, and late models were not necessarily the top billing class at all the tracks
anymore.
“There were people that thought we were nuts when we told them we weren’t going to run late models,” said Hafeman. “We were adamant in supporting the modifieds and making them our top division. Things turned out pretty well. We proved a lot of people wrong.”
Many locals also thought they were nuts to try and race on Friday nights. “Many thought there would be no way we could compete with the Friday night fish fries, which are so popular in the area,” said Debbie Hafeman. “Again, we proved them wrong.”
The IMCA modified division soared in the mid-1990s. It was widely regarded that if you could win at Luxemburg, you could pretty much win anywhere in the United States. In a twenty-car feature field, it was anybody’s guess as to who would wind up in victory lane on any given night.
“I do think around that time Luxemburg had some of the highest car counts in the nation early on for IMCA,” Debbie Hafeman said. “The business community in Luxemburg really stepped up and supported the race track. They knew it brought money into the community. They gave us a chance at Luxemburg.”
While Tri-Star quickly found success at Luxemburg, the same could not be said at I-43 Raceway in Manitowoc. In 1990, the Hafeman’s partnered with Manitowoc-area businessman and fellow racer Brian Reif. The three promoted Wednesday night races on a much bigger half-mile, clay oval located at the Manitowoc County Expo Fairgrounds.
“It was a disaster financially,” Kelly Hafeman said. Poor fan attendance and car counts kept their balance ledgers in the red. “The city of Manitowoc and the whole county just did not support that race track, for whatever reason.” The Hafemans’ daughter, Destiny, worked in the front ticket booth selling tickets to the Manitowoc show. “I remember Destiny telling us one night, ‘Dad, some fans only want to pay half price for the races,” Kelly Hafeman recalled. “I said, ‘Destiny, what do you mean?’ Sure enough, somebody handed her three or four dollars and only wanted to pay half price. I told her to tell them to just go away. We weren’t going to do that.”
The three promoters took it in the shorts to the tune of $90,000 that year – a huge loss for any short-track promoter, especially in 1990. It was a “one and done” for the trio. “But we got three really cool mag lights from the county,” said Kelly Hafeman. “So the running joke has always been the three of us each got a $30,000 flashlight for our efforts promoting the races at Manitowoc.”
Meanwhile, back at Luxemburg, Tri-Star took pride in selling more than just racing on Friday nights. “We always viewed what we were doing as selling entertainment,” Kelly Hafeman said. “We’d bring in Cuddles the Clown, have Big Wheel races, kids coin tosses and such. We really focused what we were doing on family. I think some of that has been lost a little bit locally in the racing scene. We took a lot of pride in that. The racing is what we did for the drivers.”
Debbie Hafeman admits she was the Tri-Star “time Nazi.” “I was always making sure we started right at 7 o’clock sharp,” she said. “Sometimes those guys would get a little mad at me on the radio. But starting on time is something else we took a lot of pride in.”
Tri-Star spared no expense in terms of track preparation. “On Thursdays and Fridays, we’d always dump a minimum of
60,000 gallons of water down on the track in that two-day period,” Kelly Hafeman said. “We’d throw a ton of calcium chloride down to keep the dust down. I’d like to know how many gallons of water these promoters throw down on the dirt tracks nowadays.”
IMCA’s claim rule, which was seldom used at Luxemburg, kept the drivers on an even playing field – at least during the Tri-Star era. “I really think that $325 motor claim rule kept people in check,” said Kelly Hafeman. “You could race the modifieds and be as big of a hero with much less engine. It was a case of how much was a driver willing to potentially lose, so (the claim rule) really did its job for us at Luxemburg.”
They had their share of serious accidents during their tenure, but very few of a significant nature. “I do remember two bad fires with Brad Rohloff and Chad Paul, and I always thought about (those fires) and how lucky we were that
things could have been a lot worse,” Debbie Hafeman said. “We had a good run and we were really lucky. Ralph (Aschenbrenner) was a great partner, and we had some great racers there, too.”