Received an exciting e-mail from RR member, Laverne Zachary, current President of The Historic Speedway Group (Occoneechee) sent to him from fellow RR member, Frank Craig, a driving force in the restoration of Occoneechee Speedway.
Through the efforts of these two men and I don't know who else, Robert Peele of The New York Times Automobile Desk this weekend published an Occoneechee article in a Times blog, as well as a feature article on Ace Speedway in Altamahaw, NC.
Laverne gave me permission to post the pieces from this past weekend. The Occoneechee piece has a video at the direct story link, as does the Ace article. I an including the direct link to each article at the end of each. Please go to the link and see the great photos accompanying each story.
Thanks Laverne & Frank.
The New York Times
July 7, 2012
A Relic From Racings Early Years, Repurposed
By ROBERT PEELE
Photos by Sarah Peele
In Sundays Automobiles section, I write about Ace Speedway in Altamahaw, N.C., which like a lot of small racetracks struggled to stay afloat through the recession. Under the leadership of Brad Allen, its general manager, and with the continued support of the tracks owner, Abraham Woidislawsky, Ace is showing signs of a rebound this year, with higher car counts and rising attendance figures.
Racing has always been an uncertain business, and even in the best of times some tracks dont survive. Such was the fate of Occoneechee-Orange Speedway in Hillsborough, N.C., just northwest of Durham along the Eno River.
The tracks origins were closely tied to the birth of Nascar. In 1947, Bill France, Nascars patriarch, spotted an old horse racing track while flying over a parcel of land known as Occoneechee Farm; eager to add new courses, he bought the property and converted the half-mile horse track to a one-mile dirt oval.
On Aug. 7, 1949, during Nascars inaugural season, the Occoneechee Speedway held its first Strictly Stock race, a 200-mile event that was only the third race ever in what would become the Sprint Cup series. Bob Flock won in an Oldsmobile 88, taking home $2,000.
Nascar raced there twice a year for most of the next two decades, 32 times in all. Along the way, the track was renamed Orange Speedway, after the county where it was located in part because no one could spell Occoneechee, joked LaVerne Zachary, president of the Historic Speedway Group, which has overseen the restoration and preservation of the former speedway site.
Its hard to name a legend from Nascars early years who didnt race at Hillsborough Speedway, as it was generally known: Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts, Lee Petty, Herb Thomas, Buck Baker and Junior Johnson all won races there, as did Ned Jarrett, David Pearson and Richard Petty. Other legends visited the track as well: according to Mr. Zachary, Jayne Mansfield attended the spring race in 1963, and even rode in the pace car.
(And while he was a household name only in our household, my father visited the track, too, a number of times, with a friend and a movie camera. The film excerpt below was shot on Oct. 27, 1963 Joe Weatherly, No. 8, started on the pole and won the race.)
By the late 1960s, Mr. Zachary said, pressure from local church groups, who didnt like racing on Sundays, led Bill France to look elsewhere as he sought to build a larger, faster track. Unable to persuade local authorities to expand the Hillsborough site, he turned instead to a small town in Alabama and built the 2.66-mile Talladega Superspeedway.
Richard Petty won the final race at Occoneechee-Orange Speedway on Sept. 15, 1968; the next year, its slot in Nascars schedule would go to Talladega.
Orange High School, which had used the infield for its football games since 1958, continued to play there until the early 1970s. After that, the site fell into disrepair. By the early 2000s, the track was almost completely overgrown. The forest reclaimed the site and the track surface was reduced to a small pathway, deeply rutted by 4-by-4s.
The grand stands were so covered with weeds and briars you could hardly see them, said Mr. Zachary.
Restoration efforts began in 2006, led by Frank Craig, who attended races there as a youngster when his father worked on the tracks security staff. With the permission of the trust that had acquired the property, the group cleared some of the trees and underbrush to widen the path, and later rebuilt the ticket and concession stands, which had fallen in.
The restoration is a continuing project, Mr. Craig said, and while honoring the tracks storied history is an important goal, the group also considers it a part of its mission to respect natures role in the site. And nature itself has done its part to preserve the old track, as Mr. Craig attests.
When asked about the gentle upward slope along the edge of the trail through each of its turns, Mr. Craig confirmed that it was part of the speedways original banking.
The trees saved it, he said.
Direct link to New York Times Blog story on Occoneechee:
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/a-relic-from-racings-early-years-repurposed/
The Link contains numerous Occoneechee photos & a video.
The Wary Dtente That Saved a Racetrack From Extinction
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEELE
Published: July 6, 2012
ALTAMAHAW, N.C.
BRAD ALLEN has no time to stand around and talk. Friday is race night at Ace Speedway, so theres a drivers meeting to convene and prerace activities to coordinate. A representative from a national racing series is waiting up in the track office, meanwhile, to discuss a coming event.
And at some point Mr. Allen, Aces general manager since 2010, will need to meet with the tracks owner, Abraham Woidislawsky, who is making a rare visit from up north. If recent experience is any guide, it should be a friendly discussion.
As if that werent enough, Mr. Allen entered his own car tonight, his first race in more than a year, so he needs to touch base with his pit crew, otherwise known as his father and his uncle. Theyll have to shout practice has begun, and cars are already screaming around the 4/10-mile paved oval at up to 120 miles an hour. There are five races on the schedule, with nearly 60 entries in three divisions.
Its a blessing to be busy again at Ace, a 56-year-old bullring about an hour west of the Research Triangle here in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Only a few years ago the speedway was verging on collapse, weighed down by debt, losing fans and competitors in equal measure. The recession that began in late 2007 hit hard; even major series like IndyCar and Nascar Sprint Cup suffered in attendance and TV ratings, intensifying the challenge of retaining the support of sponsors and automakers.
Down at the grass-roots level, where the racing hews closest to its rough-and-tumble origins and where future stars are groomed, the very existence of some tracks has been threatened. According to the National Speedway Directory, by 2011 the number of active racing facilities in the United States and Canada fell by nearly 100 from its peak of about 1,600 in 2004.
Most of those tracks are short ovals like Ace, which draw drivers, fans and sponsorship dollars almost entirely from their local communities. Even in the best of times profits can be thin, and for many small racetracks survival has long been a week-to-week proposition.
Known as Southern Speedway when it opened in 1956, Ace started out as a dirt track. In 1990 it was paved and gained Nascar affiliation; an expansion and renovation in 1999 brought it to its current seating capacity of 5,000.
Ace remained under local ownership until 2006, when Mr. Woidislawsky, a 72-year-old Philadelphia real estate developer, bought the speedway with a partner for $2.1 million. With his Eastern European accent he was born in Russia and raised in Poland and Israel he would never be mistaken for a local resident. Meandering through the pits on race night he seemed at ease, trading greetings and well-wishes with drivers, crew members and track officials.
Mr. Woidislawsky, who concedes that he knows almost nothing about racing, said his involvement with Ace resulted in part from his love of the spectacle and his admiration for the hardworking families who participate.
I was hooked, he said of his first visit to Ace, in 2006. The noise, the people. It was beautiful to see.
But the allure of track ownership quickly collided with reality. His partner exited a few months after the purchase; early capital investments like new computer systems piled on debt, as did the construction of go-kart and tractor-pull courses on the 50-acre property.
Meanwhile, the economic downturn was taking its toll, with unemployment in Alamance County, Aces home, rising above 13 percent in early 2010. Racing is expensive perhaps $30,000 a year for a Late Model competitor and when a local economy suffers, drivers, sponsors and fans all cut back.
Trying to reverse a steady decline in attendance and revenue, Mr. Woidislawsky hired and fired several track managers in his first three years as owner. The tracks debts mounted, and according to Mr. Allen, then only a competitor at Ace, some checks to vendors and drivers bounced.
Disputes over money and whom to blame when there isnt enough of it are something of a tradition in the racing business, and the he-saids and she-saids of Aces troubles during those three years could fill a bank vault.
No matter where the fault lies, those dark days demonstrate how quickly the financial food chain that supports a small racetrack can spiral toward collapse. Fewer cars mean fewer fans and a loss of incentive for sponsors; a loss of sponsors means lower payouts. By the fall of 2009, the number of weekly competitors had plummeted, Mr. Allen said, down to 10 or 12 cars in the pits on some nights, and the crowds in the stands thinned as well.
The low point came on a Friday night late in that season when Mr. Allen counted about 200 people in the stands. And half of them were Cub Scouts who just happened to be camping on the grounds, he said.
Through it all, Mr. Woidislawskys reputation in the community suffered. That he was trying to run the business remotely from Philadelphia visiting the track only four times a year, by his estimate didnt help.
Finding the right person to handle day-to-day operations was essential.
Mr. Allen, 47, was not the most likely candidate to reverse Aces fortunes. Hed never run a racetrack before, and like the speedway itself, hed been through a tough spell divorce and unemployment and was paying his bills by working odd jobs.
Still, he brought a lifelong love of Ace Speedway he remembers watching his uncles race there as a child, and he won Modified championships at the track in 2006-8 and he was trusted within the local racing community. When Mr. Woidislawsky hired him for the 2010 season, his job, in essence, was to rebuild that community and in the process revive the tracks fragile financial ecosystem.
He started by cutting ticket prices, and he gave discount rates to local sponsors to encourage their loyalty. He called drivers who had left the speedway, inviting them to return.
To Mr. Allen, this was the main issue. If nobodys going there to race, nobodys going to watch, he said.
Higher car counts would lure more fans to the track, which would attract sponsors, which would in turn allow Ace to offer higher purses. Not incidentally, back gate revenue the entry fees paid by drivers and team members, $25 to $30 a head would increase as well.
As Mr. Allen would learn, though, its not as simple as promoting the next weeks event and selling tickets. Unforeseen costs, from digging a new well to repairing a broken speaker system, crop up. There are vendors to pay, sponsors to court and weather forecasts to watch rainouts are a huge setback.
If this race night is any indication, his duties never stop. He dons a rainbow wig and overalls to join in prerace antics for the fans, and leads them in a kind of pep-rally chant; he even joins the tracks announcer in singing the national anthem.
Theres an awkward moment, too, when the owners visit is announced. Mindful of the moment, Mr. Allen reminds the fans of Mr. Woidislawskys continued support of Ace and coaxes a polite round of applause from them.
The disparate cultures represented by the two men, the local boy with the Carolina drawl and the northerner whose strained English can come across as blunt, couldnt be more obvious. Both agree that the relationship has involved some push and pull, culminating last fall in what Mr. Allen described as an angry exchange over the last-minute cancellation of a big race.
Mr. Allen said he was prepared to leave Ace at the end of the season he had offers from three other tracks, he said but on a November visit to Philadelphia the men found common ground.
I realized this guys really not too different than I am, Mr. Allen said. Were just in different worlds.
Their continued partnership appears to be working. Two of this seasons early races drew about 2,000 fans, according to Mr. Allen, and attendance since then has averaged about 1,800. And for the first time in years, the track is operating within its budget, Mr. Allen said.
Talk about money long enough and you see nothing but dollar signs around the track one can only imagine how much it costs to rent one of those track-sweeping trucks for a night, or replace those light bulbs.
Once the green flag drops, none of it matters. Nobody comes to Ace Speedway to get rich, anyway. Theyre here to nurture a dream or keep one alive, or because theyve been coming for generations, whether they love it or love someone who does.
And short-track racing almost never disappoints. The corners are tight and the drivers get feisty, as do the fans.
Out on the track tonight, the Extreme class clatters around the oval like a junkyard raised from the dead. The Modifieds are a more serious affair after a few too many shenanigans among drivers the flagman jumps onto the track during a caution-flag period and halts an oncoming car like a traffic cop. Theres an altercation in the pits after three cars are thrown out of the race, prompting fans to rush the fence along the front straight for a look.
Meanwhile, Mr. Woidislawskys good-will tour of the grandstands continues, including a summit meeting of sorts with Miss Ace Speedway, a student at nearby Elon University. Even if it seems at times that folks still dont quite know what to make of him, theres a grudging respect for what Mr. Woidislawsky has done for Ace.
I never feel like they dont like me, he said. Every time I see them, Hi Abraham, thank you for staying with us, and bearing with us.
For Mr. Allen, who finished sixth in his first race back, the larger implication cant go unstated.
In the end, he could have closed the thing down, he said. He could have turned it into a mobile home park, or just bulldozed it. But he kept it open.
Direct Link to New York Times Story on Ace Speedway:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/automobiles/a-wary-detente-that-saved-a-track-from-extinction.html?ref=automobiles
The direct link story has many really neat photos.
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"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
updated by @dave-fulton: 12/16/16 07:54:05AM
