Thursday, December 22, 2022

Wrapping Up 2022 and Looking Ahead to the New Year

 



The 2022 racing season ended with a whimper when I was snowed in and couldn't get to what was planned to be my last race of the season. That being said, the 2022 racing season is now a wrap and before we move on to a new season, it is time to take a quick look back at 2022.

In retrospect, 2022 proved to be a good racing season overall. It seemed like many of the special events did very well both in crowd attendance and in participants. The “regular” season races struggled however, at a lot of tracks with only so-so attendance and car counts that were at some points pretty lame. It seemed that particularly after the 4th of July holiday both cars and spectators started to fade from the weekly shows, probably for the logical reason that both segments felt a money crunch and were forced to make some tough decisions about when they raced or where and how often they spectated at.

This has always probably been the case but seems to be more pronounced in recent years, possibly due to the increase in “special” events that charge a higher rate to get in with many tracks feeling this is the route to take to remain solvent. The only problem is that these events only made it tougher for the weekly shows to survive as spectators had to budget their money and likely skipped some weekly shows if they wanted to attend the higher priced special events while racers chose to limit their participation in many cases to racing perhaps only one night a week along with the specials. This has been and will continue to be a difficult juggling act for promoters to deal with and racers to cope with. Everyone likes special events but the weekly shows are what the sport thrives on and without the local shows, no new drivers are developed while most fans will say that their first exposure to racing and the thing that got them to come back, was first seeing racing at the local track, not at some high powered gala special event.

For myself, it was another great season and an enjoyable one from start to finish. I was able to go to some racing in every month of the year and my trips took me from the deserts of the Southwest all the way to Florida and North Carolina on the East Coast. I saw just about every class out there race one time or another but my main diet was the dirt tracks of America with Late Models and Modifieds being my favorite classes. I got to see most of the sanctioning bodies in action and a great cross section of drivers from nearly coast to coast and as wide a variety of tracks as one can imagine. I got to see racing at some of the greatest “palaces” for dirt track racing around to the smallest and most rustic of facilities and most everything in between. From red clay to pea gravel, just about any kind of racing surface was seen and on a brief and rare occasion, even a surface of tar or asphalt(but not many!).

In 2021, I thought that I had reached the top end of what a season could look like when I attended two hundred and four nights of racing. Let's face it. I am very lucky in that I no longer have to go to work unless I feel like it and I have a very forgiving wife who allows me to humor my interest of spending a lot of time at the track. And she likes to go along to many of the biggest trips as she knows just about as many people at the track as I do as this disease called racing runs through her veins also. Being able to go to events in New Mexico, Arizona, Florida and other states before the snow melts in the Midwest surely lengthens the season and give us the chance to see many new and different tracks too.

An early start to the season plus a prolonged dry spell this Summer in the Midwest made it easier to catch a lot of races without fighting the weather as much as some years. At one point in June and July, made a stretch of attending races for nineteen straight nights and saw twenty eight races in the month of June.

In 2022 I topped my old record by a single night of racing, having attended two hundred and five nights of racing during a season that started on January 5th and ended on December 3rd. When I added up my season records recently I was surprised at the total as to me it didn't feel like I was that busy during the Summer. I do have a nice advantage as while some would say that I live in the “sticks in northern Wisconsin”, I actually have over a dozen race tracks within a couple hours drive or so and tracks that race on every night of the week except Monday. I'll bet there are plenty of folks that live in much more urban areas than that not able to make that claim. So, during the busiest months of the Summer, I really could stay pretty local and still see plenty of racing. But that's not necessary the way I do things as people like Jerry VanSickel tell me I should just move to Iowa because he runs into me so often in the Hawkeye state.

In fact, I attended races in sixteen different states plus one Canadian Province and saw racing at sixty eight different tracks during the year. I did also get to five new tracks this year, two in Missouri and one a piece in Iowa, Texas and the Province of Ontario Canada. July was my busiest month with twenty nine races and December was the slowest with only three.

2022 marked the forty second consecutive year that I have attended over one hundred nights of racing and overall, I have been to three hundred and thirty one different tracks in twenty nine states and three Canadian Provinces. I started with great racing at Vado Raceway Park in New Mexico and ended up with the spectacular show at the Dome at America's Center and in between had much fun and enjoyment at a host of different tracks. I saw the last race ever(sadly) at I-80 Speedway and dodged a tornado near Southern Oklahoma Speedway in Ardmore and did so much more during the course of the year.

I've been around the block enough times that no matter where I go, I generally run into someone that I know and can chat with. And there are so many interesting folks out there at the tracks, from the lady at the back gate at East Bay Raceway Park that only sees me once a year but can remember my name like she spoke to me every day of the week to the rabid race fans North of the border in Canada to all the nice promoters, announcers, p.r. people and track workers at all the tracks from West to East and everywhere in between plus all the spectators that remain loyal to the sport. And without all of them, we would have nothing.

Turn the page now to 2023. I will be ready to hit the road once again, not tiring of it as of yet. Things will be just a bit different in the coming year as Linda will now be retired too. Perhaps she will hit the road with me, along with every trip. Perhaps she will just pick and choose her visits or perhaps we will both be home knitting socks, who knows?

We will, however, be taking advantage of the fact that we can seek warmer weather instead of riding out this constant pattern of snow and then cold here in the Midwest. We plan to start out at Cocopah Speedway near Yuma AZ, then migrate to New Mexico for the Wild West Shootout before swinging back to central Arizona for Don Shaw's shows and then heading for the sun and surf in Florida. We hope to see a lot of Midwestern drivers racing, perhaps particularly in New Mexico and Arizona and hope to see a lot of Midwestern fans also following the racing action.

Our plan is to cover as much of this racing as possible and report the stories and cover the drivers that make the news early in this new season. Thanks for reading this and best wishes for a prosperous 2023.

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