By sometime this week, the beautiful facility that is Richmond Raceway will have been cleaned up and mothballed to sit. Quiet. Empty.
In all fairness, I have no idea what the internal schedule for my home racetrack might be. It’s possible there are tests of various kinds scheduled there or other non-public activities.
Just no racing. We hope the racing will return next summer, but as with this year, it probably will be a single weekend of activity, followed by months of wind sweeping through empty spaces.
I think that’s sad. I know it has everything to do with economics, but it’s still sad, especially when you look at the facility’s long history of motorsports competition.
Last weekend’s NASCAR Cup event was the 136th at Richmond for that division, dating back to 1953 on the old fairgrounds dirt half-mile. Additionally, there have been nearly 80 Xfinity races (dating back to 1982 and mostly when the series carried other names) and 17 Craftsman Truck Series events. Nearly all those races were run on “Cup weekends.”
Remember also that, for nine years (2001-09) in the heady heyday of racing hereabouts, there also was a weekend for IndyCar racing, with USAC Silver Crowns and USAC National Sprint Cars running preliminary events.
Still, that only adds up to a little more than 250 races, and the total number run at the Atlantic Rural Exposition fairgrounds/Richmond Fairgrounds Raceway/Richmond International Raceway/Richmond Raceway (and “Strawberry Hill, to use the local geographic moniker) is probably over 400. Most of those other races weren’t run on the major race weekends.
As I noted in the history article printed here last week, there were two unsuccessful attempts (one with midgets and one with stock cars) to begin weekly racing at the fairgrounds, plus there were a couple of years when the racing there was pretty close to weekly: in 1952, there were 23 modified races on the dirt half-mile, followed by 18 in 1953 and 14 in 1954. During these years, Royall Speedway and Richmond Speedway also were operating, and in ’54, Mooer’s Field was running weekly events as well (although Royall didn’t race every week that year). That’s a LOT of racing, even at ticket prices usually under $2 for an adult.
By 1955, the frost was pretty much off the racing pumpkin, with race tracks closing everywhere. Only five events were run at the fairgrounds, each on a stand-alone date: three for modifieds, one for midgets, and one Grand National (Cup).
This also takes us into the era of Paul Sawyer as the track promoter, and Paul almost never limited his racing season to two weekends. The extra events continued after the old fairgrounds track was paved in 1968 and even after Richmond International Raceway replaced that track 20 years later.
In 1989, Sawyer supplemented his two Cup weekends with a Big Rig semi-truck race, and the next season he brought in the ill-fated Sportsman Division and the modifieds to run a doubleheader. The next year the Sportsman Division and modified cars returned, and yet another weekend featured modifieds and NASCAR’s All-Pro Series.
A couple of years later, the USAC Silver Crown cars came to town, and the local late model sportsman racers put in some appearances as well.
To me, working with the track public relations staff on race weekends back then, all of these shows were awesome. Unfortunately, I think the cast of participants kept changing because none of them was particularly successful financially.
Still . . . it bugged me when International Speedway Corp. (since merged into NASCAR) bought the track from Sawyer, and the extra events went away permanently (almost).
The exception was in 2018 (or ’19), when the New England-based Pro All Stars Series (PASS) arranged for a track rental to run a weekend of racing for multiple classes of racers. The event was scheduled for late 2018 but was rained out and rescheduled for early 2019, when it was run before a small-ish crowd.
I put a huge asterisk by this event because the track didn’t even acknowledge its existence on the web or social media. You would think the two parties would have worked things out to try for success, but I guess not everybody thinks that way. The weekend was not repeated after 2019.
(I had actually planned to attend the original date for the race but was unable to get down to Virginia on the make-up date. I still think it would have been an interesting, if flawed, event.)
After that it was back to two weekends, which now has become one weekend (for which we’re keeping our fingers crossed). It just seems like a waste.
I know the overhead on a place like Richmond puts holding smaller events there in a different category than holding races at a local weekly track. I also know that something that that few zeros in the budget numbers won’t get the attention of corporate higher-ups, who control this part of the racing world.
I can’t help but think about a number of years ago when I attended a horse racing program at Churchill Downs in Louisville on a normal Sunday afternoon. That cavernous place, built and rebuilt for the Kentucky Derby, had maybe 2,500 or 3,000 fans rattling around in it that day. You could pretty much have a full section of grandstand all to yourself. There were no lines at the betting windows.
Yet somehow Churchill Downs was fine with holding the event. Why not Richmond, with more horsepower?
I’d make every effort to get there.
Frank’s Loose Lug Nuts
Just in case you’re interested, here’s a little more about the last 79 years of racing in Richmond. (After the Cup numbers, not all of these are exact and a presented for your entertainment, not as matters of record.) Besides the 136 GN/Cup events, 80 (more or less) Xfinity races, and 17 Craftsman Truck runs, there were three events for the old Convertible Division, 14 for the modern era Whelan Modifieds, plus about 30 Late Model Sportsman races (the predecessors of Xfinity) and maybe 30-40 more for earlier period Modifieds.
A variety of other NASCAR divisions have run, including K&N Pro Series (now ARCA East), NASCAR Southeast, GT/Grand American, Late Model Stock Car, All Pro, Baby Grand/International Sedan, and NASCAR Midget (yes, there was such a thing), most making from one to five appearances.
Denny Hamlin’s Short Track Showdown also made a couple of appearances at RIR after starting life at nearby Southside Speedway.
The IndyCars ran nine times, but the AAA “big cars,” their predecessors by several decades, had about the same number of appearances, as did the URC sprint cars, which were similar to “big cars” when all that was going on. USAC Silver Crowns, also descendants of the “big cars,” had about 10 appearances, with the USAC National Sprints appearing about five times and the USAC Midgets three times. The Formula 2000 cars also showed up a couple of times.
Besides the Big Rigs and the Sportsman Division cars (sponsored by Igloo at one point), other competitors included the International Race of Champions (IROC) series for a couple of years, and the AAA Stock Cars and Circuit of Champions cars, which ran in the early ‘50s before the track settled on hitching its wagon to NASCAR.
All these statistics come from The Third Turn and Racing Reference, as well as my own research of the Richmond newspaper race accounts and those in National SpeedSport News and other racing publications. The Third Turn has the most comprehensive listing, although it has errors and omissions. I hope to offer some additions and fixes there over time.
One Final Note
Much has been made on official channels of Richmond having its first “sellout” in 17 years last week. I’m happy for them, because I really want to see racing stay in town, but that doesn’t mean that I can let all that cheering go on without mentioning that the sellouts 18 and more years ago were with a seating capacity more than twice what it is today.
When I was in the old Infield Media Center on Cup race nights, we knew we weren’t going to get out of the three for at least three or four hours after the checkered flag, because 110,000 people were leaving, and all of them had an easier way out than we did.
Nevertheless, congratulations to everybody at the speedway on filling all the seats. Hope it becomes a routine occurrence again – maybe enough so to start adding seats again.
We’ll always wish the best for our home track even when it seems the current owner has positioned it for failure with date changes and local management with no motorsports experience. Thanks for the recap.
I need to make a correction: There’s a paragraph in the story that mentions a lot of modified races run in 1952-54. This is an error. The Third Turn lists races for those years that actually took place at Richmond Speedway, the ill-fated quarter mile that ran from 1951-55 and was located where I-295 crosses U.S. 301 today. I’ve tried to work with The Third Turn about correcting this but as of now have had no luck.