10.03
By Steve Hummer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday night at Lanier National Speedway.
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Think auto racing before it got all rich and pretty and slick as Jeff Gordon’s haircut.
“You know when racing began?” long-time Lanier driver Mark Gallichott asked. “As soon as the guy finished building the second car.”
At places like Lanier, you feel closer to the beginnings.
The track is just across the street but a world away from Road Atlanta, the course where Ferraris and Jaguars and Porsches play. “That’s the wine and cheese bunch,” Lanier’s owner Donnie Clack said. “We’re the beer and pretzels bunch.”
The grandstands for the Sept. 24 show were half filled, the night’s attendance estimated at 1,500. “One of the biggest crowds around here in a long while,” Jerry Garland, who regularly makes the drive from Canton to watch the cars go ’round, said.
“Everyone shows up at your funeral,” Clack cracked.
Racing’s proving grounds
Clack had put out the word. This show would be the last weekly program he would stage. It would be up to the next owner, if one could be found, to resume regular racing. Given the tough times facing any small business, who could say for certain that, after 30 years, this wasn’t a last hurrah for a classic southern short track?
On one terraced Braselton hillside, fans parked their trucks, dropped their tailgates and blended the fumes of smoldering charcoal with those of smoking fossil fuels.
Opposite were the grandstands, rows of concrete painted a weary shade of white. There’s no chair-back seating here, or bench seating for that matter. Just pick out your little section of slab. Crowning the grandstand is a concession building where a man can buy a fried bologna sandwich, were he so inclined.
Fans on both side looked down on 3/8-mile worth of asphalt, an oval with turns tighter than the Braves in September.
When Clack bought this place eight years ago, it seemed to him that it was a kind of shrine, a natural amphitheater of speed. “God put this place on earth to be a racetrack, the way it’s hollowed out,” he still says.
Since buying in, Clack had seen the profitability of his little track hit a wall. He had seen the economic malaise blanket industries that feed many of his customers and drivers (construction and automotive). Interest in this grass roots style of racing was faltering. Rising gas prices nibbled away at drivers’ wallets. Car counts tumbled, and fewer cars racing meant fewer paying customers watching.
“I’m just tired of fighting the battle. I’m not going to do it anymore,” he said. “Maybe if we can get some new blood, new life, new money, that might help.”
Last week, as the owner contemplated what became of his dream to own the place, he said the lyrics of a country-bluegrass song had been playing through his mind lately.
“It goes, ‘You ain’t the kind of woman I wanted, but you’re the kind of woman I got,’” Clack said.
Thus another little piece of Americana, like a drive-in theater or a five-and-dime store lunch counter, looked extinction in the eye.
For decades, these short tracks – bullrings they’re called because of the close quarters – have served as racing’s instructional league. Before they could be licensed to drive on the street, youngsters could turn laps in go carts and then little Legends cars, scale model rides with a slightly Ringling Brothers look. At the top of the short track pyramid are the late-model drivers, the grizzled vets who, at Lanier, run qualifying laps of 115 miles per hour and tempt the outside walls as they exit every turn.
“It’s where NASCAR got its roots,” Bill Elliott, Awesome Bill from Dawsonville, the winner of 44 major NASCAR races, including two Daytona 500s, said. His son, Chase, ran many times at Lanier.
When a place like Lanier sputters, it shakes racing at all levels. “It’s one of the premier asphalt tracks in the Southeast,” Atlanta Motor Speedway general manager Ed Clark said.
“I feel bad. One, for our history there, having grown up racing there,” Georgia-born NASCAR driver David Ragan (currently 17th in the Spring Cup standings) said.
“It also makes me feel bad that short track racing in general is definitely suffering. There are still some great markets in the United States where short track racing is thriving. It depends on the right situation, the right area, the right type of racing.”
Georgia has, by Clark’s count, 23 short tracks. Ragan’s uncle runs one — the 3/8-mile Watermelon Capital Speedway in Cordele. “And it has struggled,” Ragan said. “He’s had to make some tough changes. He doesn’t race every week. He has a shorter season. You have to change things up a bit in order to survive.”
The landscape has changed greatly from the time when Clark was growing up in Virginia, spending long weekend nights at South Boston Speedway. Little things like cable TV, the Xbox and encroaching urbanization have altered the public’s appetite for diversions.
“There’s never been a more challenging time [for track owners],” Clark said. His Atlanta Motor Speedway runs a regular short track program called Thursday Night Thunder. “You have to work hard, be creative. It’s like minor league baseball. You just can’t run a race program without doing other [entertaining] things.”
Success in the dirt
For as much as tracks like Lanier have struggled, others have found a comfortable niche. Dirt tracks, where drivers can run less expensively than on asphalt because of reduced wear on tires and engines, are generally healthier.
“We’ve had one of our better years ever,” Mickey Swims, who owns Dixie Speedway in Woodstock and Rome Speedway, both dirt short tracks, said.
Despite a tornado that damaged Dixie Speedway on Labor Day, “We’ve been going wide open, full throttle,” Swims said.
“Dixie has been here for 40 years. Many of our cars don’t go anywhere else, and the fans do the same. We’ve built up a lot of loyalty.”
Many drivers and fans hold the belief that Lanier is too special a venue to just dry up and blow away. Dwayne Buggay, owner of Elite Motors Inc. in Cartersville, is a former track champion at Lanier. He remembers the years, as recently as the early 2000s, when the stands were packed and there so many race cars that there wasn’t room for them all on the infield. He believes there is a future for a track like Lanier, and has shopped the idea of buying the place among his business contacts. He doesn’t want to own it himself, for that would mean he’d have to stop racing there.
“This track can succeed,” he said. He ticked off some of the ways: Bringing in additional classes of cars, changing to Friday night racing, building improved relationships with drivers, promoting aggressively. Wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done, he insisted.
The Sept. 24 show was by all reports a good one. The racing was door-to-door, Braselton’s Shane Sawyer claiming the final event of the night. And it was a pretty good crowd that filed out at the end, passing beneath a message above the main gate, painted long ago, back in an age of certainty:
“Thank Y’all for Coming!
See ya Next Week.”
Bill Elliott’s margin of victory at Rockingham in October 1984 was one foot. (Photo: ISC Archives)
