The Scoop
Joe Verdegan
Posted on: Monday September 14, 2020
When the dust settles at your favorite dirt or paved bullring in the next month 2020 will go down as a year you’ll want to forget or one that you’ll never forget.
I choose the latter.
As an industry we have faced a “pandemic” (I’m going to try really hard to stay apolitical here) that has affected our great country at virtually every level. Our day-to-day lives were drastically changed. And what it did was put things in perspective.
Fortunately, many of our beloved racetracks and tours (with a few very unfortunate exceptions) were able to remain open. Track promoters juggled their schedules – many opening their doors many weeks later than planned despite losing quite a bit of sponsorship revenue.
Same thing applied for the race teams. Many teams simply put their remaining sponsors from past seasons on the race car as a “thank you” for their support in past seasons. Some were fortunate enough to scrounge up some breadcrumbs and keep on rolling. Somehow though, someway, the race teams seemed to make it to the racetracks.
To me the tone was set at Park Jefferson Speedway in South Dakota in late April. It was a rare weekend in the U.S. where our country was under Covid-19’s full grip. Track promoter Terry McCarl, along with 141 Speedway (Francis Creek) promoter Toby Kruse had the stones to host the first live race under Covid-19 restrictions. A double bill event was run with 410 sprint cars and IMCA modifieds on the dirt oval.
The event made national news as it was essentially the only sporting event run in the country. Initially, McCarl had intended to run the race with a limited 700 fans in the stands. Those fans, who had to purchase their tickets online in advance, would have been spread out throughout a grandstand that seats 4,000 people.
A few days prior to the event the track and event promoters caved into pressure from South Dakota’s governor and opted to continue to run the race but without fans, who all received a refund. “They limited it to 32 sprint cars and 32 IMCA modifieds,” said Manitowoc’s Scotty Thiel, who towed eight and half hours west to race his winged sprint car in the $5,000-to-win event. “The Big Wheel” finished 12th in the main event after running out of tear offs on his helmet which hampered his vision. He also won a preliminary heat earlier in the night. “The pit area was pretty big, and they had us spaced apart at least 10 feet. Everybody had masks and from what I could see they most everybody did a pretty good job of abiding by those regulations to run a safe race. Although it was surreal to run a race without fans. It was kind of a quiet, relaxed atmosphere. I never once felt unsafe at all. I feel I put myself at a greater risk everyday with my job, so this was nothing to me.”
What made the event a success was that Pay Per View sales were strong enough by Speed Shift that McCarl and Kruse hit a home run in the venue. Every track promoter in the country was watching that event with a jaundiced eye, waiting and watching to see if they’d be able to pull off the same at their respective bullrings.
The event drew big name, former NASCAR wheelmen Kenny Schrader and Kenny Wallace. In the business model of most short tracks, promoters cannot make driver and employee payout without having fans in the grandstands. “I don’t think Speed Shift was ready for the surge of viewers who bought it,” Thiel said. “Nobody had seen a live race for a couple of months. They pushed the envelope a bit and I think they made a killing, and good for them. I mean not having fans makes it tough for short tracks to pay the bills. You just can’t do it without something like this Pay Per View.”
The next weekend Mississippi Thunder Speedway in Fountain City, Wisconsin (near the Minnesota border) also had the stones to open their doors for a race. Again, track promoters across the country were keeping a close eye on how things were developing.
As we got into May in Wisconsin, the northeastern Wisconsin dirt tracks got together and agreed to “hold off” on promoting any races until things “settled down” a bit. All but one track, that is.
Bob Schneider, the promoter of Gravity Park USA in Chilton, sneered at the rest of the world and “Bulldozer Bob” as he’s nicknamed announced he was going to host a weekly race in late May. And he did.
It’s been a well-known fact in recent years that whichever local dirt track opens their doors first they usually relish in a night with a chock-full grandstand of fans and a pit area swelled with race cars.
In recent years in Northeast Wisconsin it’s usually been either 141 Speedway in Francis Creek or even Shawano Speedway who’ve earned the opening night, profitable spoils. But this year, with the uncertainty of the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent “safer-at-home” orders just recently relaxed, many local dirt tracks decided to “tread lightly” when it came to swinging their gates open for race fans in the 2020 season.
Schneider, who had held numerous practice sessions for drivers only without race fans in attendance for a few weeks in May, decided to go “all in” with three straight nights of racing.
That Friday night heading into Memorial Day weekend saw what Schneider described as the “biggest crowd” he’s ever had at the quarter-mile, clay oval carved out of some farmland on Chilton’s northside. A weekly record 158 cars in six divisions jammed the pit area. The race fans, estimated at a crowd of 1,500, filled his bleachers with little, if any appearance of concern of social distancing.
On the track’s Facebook page, Gravity Park “encouraged” social distancing and the use of masks, but none were “required.” “Honestly, I’m not sure if I even saw two people wearing masks,” Schneider said. “People were begging us to open up for a while now. The drivers wanted to open – they were tired of just practicing and wanted to get some local racing in instead of going down south to Iowa or another state to race. They were tired of being couped up inside and wanted to start living their lives again. We answered the bell. It was successful and I’ve got no regrets at all.”
And while the stars aligned for Schneider, the “new kid” on the block in his third season as promoter of the oval, a relatively smooth, dust-free surface which was prepped which provided for some great side-by-side action. “We had four-wide for our grand national division feature,” said Schneider, who widened the smaller oval in the off season to allow for more racing space. “We drew drivers from Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois this weekend.”
While a few other area track promoters were wringing their hands and remaining cautious as to not opening too soon, Schneider maintains he has no regrets whatsoever. “If any other area promoters are bothered by that because they were scared or jealous to host a race this early that’s their business and I respect their decisions,” Schneider said. “But what we have here is a private business – not some county leased facility. We’ve got a true skin in the game. We handle all the maintenance on the property. We can’t rely on the county to do anything for us. We do it all ourselves. We’ve got a ton of time and money invested in here and we’ve got to do what we can within the rules to make this a profitable deal. And that’s what we did.”
As the weeks moved up slowly the northeast Wisconsin dirt tracks were able to swing their gates open. So did Wisconsin International Raceway in Kaukauna, Northeast Wisconsin’s lone paved oval. To the north in Michigan Norway Speedway was forced all year long to run under a 500-fan limit in the grandstand, or 25 percent of their capacity whichever was less. The Dickinson County Racing Association (DCRA) made it work.
And what happened? Most tracks did well. Grandstands were usually as full as they could be and one of the big reasons was because short tracks, for the first time in a long time, didn’t have much competition for the entertainment dollar. For the most part there weren’t youth sports leagues going on. Concerts. Forget about it. Local festivals? County fairs? With very few exceptions, weekly short track racing faced very little competition in terms of entertainment.
There were a few exceptions, however. Gregg McKarns, president of Madison International Speedway and the ARCA Midwest Tour, was stuck in Dane County, and was only able to host a handful of tour races and the shows at MIS he was able to host he was forced to do something akin to a drive in theatre. The “red flag” was also thrown out to Red Cedar Speedway in Menominee, Wisconsin.
The Hill Raceway in Sturgeon Bay was another casualty. The group PKS3 Promotions promoting the third-mile, clay oval at John Miles Park decided not to fight the Door County Health Department and their head Susan Powers who said she would not let them race this year.
Despite some state lawmakers telling me PKS3 could have challenged Powers’ “opinion” and been able to open, the group backed off, licked their wounds and are vowing to return to hosting races again in 2021.
One observation that continues to impress me were the car counts at area dirt tracks. 141 Speedway, in late August, had an incredible 208 cars show up in six divisions – for a weekly show! And the new kid on the block, ‘The Burg Speedway also had pretty high car counts, even during the “dog daze” of August when car counts traditionally take a nosedive. The group switched to Sundays after Luxemburg for decades had been a Friday night show.
Being “the only game in town” on Sunday nights appears to have gone well for them. I don’t know what their books look like but just based upon their weekly car counts I would assume the group remained financially solvent enough to keep the lights on and that racing should continue in 2021 at the Kewaunee County Fairgrounds. Hats off to the group of promoters at Luxemburg, the Kewaunee County Racing Association. The group includes Lydia Kaye, Britney Parma, Andrew Sternard, Jordan Parma and Joe Orsini. You all proved a lot of people wrong, including myself! Kudos.
They had some bumps in the road and the group will be the first to admit they have room for improvement, but the effort appears to be there. And the passion. It needs to be.
I want to thank everyone for reading this – the first column on my new voyage in “The Scoop”. This is a tad different as I’ve got a little more leeway in terms of who and what I write about. And when. The plan is to keep penning columns weekly at least into October and when November rolls around we’ll go to every other week.
The audio interviews you can enjoy with your favorite retired racers and promoters here on our “On The Record” tab on the website will be updated weekly, 52 weeks a year!
Have fun at the post-regular season specials and I’m always “all ears” when it comes to suggestions on what to write or talk about here. Feel free to email me @ jverdegan2@gmail.com. Thanks again for reading!