Keep Up With Your Local Tracks and Get to Know the Next Stars
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Long-time
Richmond racing writer Randy Hallman always produces good material to read, and
a good place to find his writing is RacingVirginia.com, a website supported by various
motorsports facilities in the Old Dominion.
One
recent article profiled Matt DiBenedetto, and it mentioned that the Levine
Family Racing Cup driver got his stock car racing start at Hickory Speedway.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know that.
My
ignorance got me to thinking – funny how that works. DiBenedetto began his
stock car racing career right about the time NASCAR and Cup racing were
reaching their peak – before the crash. That also means it came at the worst
possible time for a young driver outside NASCAR’s touring series to raise his
visibility. NASCAR was pushing all other forms of motorsports off the newspaper
and magazine pages, television screens and radio dials.
Lots of folks think Randy Hallman has made
great contributions in his writing about our sport – Richmond Raceway named its
new Media Center Deadline Room after him.
When
Randy Hallman first began writing about racing for the long-gone Richmond
afternoon paper, the News-Leader, his top responsibility was Southside
Speedway, the still-running local bullring. The coverage helped you get to know
the local racers, which created fans, who migrated with those races – like Bill
Dennis, Lennie Pond and later Denny Hamlin – when they made it to the big time.
Other newspapers did the same thing.
Then
loss of advertising and audience to the internet began to cripple the newspaper
business, and nearly all that local racing coverage disappeared.
As
good as Randy’s writing was, though, most of my information about local racing
outside my area came from racing newspapers, of which there were lots. I
subscribed to as many as four or five at a time some years; now, only the
venerable Area Auto Racing News remains in my area.
Area Auto Racing News recognizes that some of
us appreciate racing beyond Cup, and its coverage keeps us up to date on the
next drivers likely to reach the top rung.
Because
AARN’s primary coverage area runs from the Mason-Dixon Line to New England, I
know who the new stars are at the local tracks in that region – that’s how I’ve
known of the enormous interest in modified drivers Ryan Preece and Stewart
Friesen as they take their shots at the big time in Cup and Gander Truck
racing.
Years
ago, I would have known about similar drivers in other regions, by reading of
their exploits in Southern Motorsports Journal, Southern MotoRacing,
Southern Auto Racing News, Tri-State Speed Press, a host of generally
short-lived racing papers in Virginia, and for the national overview, the
incomparable National Speed Sport News. I might have lived in Richmond, Va.,
but courtesy of the racing papers, I knew who was winning in New Jersey and New
York modifieds, North Carolina late models, Pennsylvania sprints, midgets in
the Midwest, etc. Drivers’ names became familiar, and when one would show up at
a big race near me, I knew something about the guy.
Speed
Sport (the former NSSN) has migrated to the web, but it focuses on national and
regional series racing; the briefs on any short track that would provide
results in years past just can’t be duplicated on electronic media. The other
print publications, sadly, are history. (Speed 51 is another relatively large
site that covers series racing well and also is heavily involved in
pay-per-view race broadcasts. RacingNews.co is yet another site, but it’s one I
haven’t visited as much.)
I’m
an old guy, but slowly I’m becoming accustomed to finding what I need online.
If I just need results, I go to Race Monitor (www.race-monitor.com), which
collects that information from a huge number of tracks. My Laps (www.mylaps.com)
is another source.
Go online, and Race Monitor will tell you who
won.
Finding
actual stories can be more difficult. Part of the problem is that most websites
don’t have the resources the papers had, yet they’re even more work to keep
up-to-date. One site I visited had several local tracks listed for results, but
the second track I checked still had nothing posted since late in 2018. You
tend not to return to something like that.
Nationally,
I’ve seen a few sites try to recreate National Speed Sport News online, but
most end up looking terribly outdated pretty quickly. The exception is Hoseheads for sprint car racing (www.hoseheads.com). This is about as
clunky, old-school a website as you can still find, and that’s why I absolutely
love it. All kinds of tracks send results there, and as long as you don’t mind
the official version of race coverage, it’s the place to go. (There are
columnists with the unofficial take on things, too.)
Most
sanctioning bodies now carry considerable news online, mostly the company line,
of course, but still a good source for the basics. You should have several
bookmarked.
The
answer for everything else, as it once was with the papers, may be just to go
local. I mentioned Racing Virginia, and while it’s not comprehensive, it seems
to gather material from most of Virginia’s tracks, it has a decent compiled
schedule, and it has Randy Hallman (among other writers), which makes it pretty
compelling.
Racing Virginia also offers this podcast, if
you want to hear interesting guests and news updates.
In
Pennsylvania, Sherry’s PA Racing Updates on Facebook does a nice job of
tracking down items of interest, and if you’re interested in something a little
more traditional (and with a professional writer at the helm), Jeremy Elliott’s
Central PA Racing Scene is a subscription-based option with quite a bit to
offer.
That
brings up a major point: I used to pay for those racing papers (or the daily
local), but we’ve entered the internet era where we think we can get it all for
free. That does present the decision for each of us as to whether what we want
is something we’re willing to pay to access – presumably, the folks supplying
this info want to eat, drink and have a roof overhead. You have to think about
that.
Increasingly,
you also have to think about it for video, too. Most major NASCAR races are
still televised by the big networks, but the world doesn’t end there. MAV-TV,
owned by Lucas Oil, is trying to pick up what the big networks don’t, but it’s
not available on many cable and satellite systems. Streaming may be the
eventual answer, but you won’t get the quality of production work you see on
Fox or NBC. Nevertheless, many local tracks now have streaming telecasts of
their races available for a season subscription, and if you don’t get out that
much. . .
The
point of all this is that there’s news out there. You may have to do some
searching to find it, but it’ll be worth it. You’ll remember that there’s a lot
more to racing than what’s on network TV Saturday night or Sunday afternoon,
and when new drivers come into one of the touring series, you might know
whether their chops or their wallets have gotten them there.
I
think I’d be interested in that.
(Anyone who would like
to suggest good online racing news sources – national, regional or local – may
comment below or otherwise pass that information along to me, and I’ll gladly
share it.)
Frank’s
Loose Lug Nuts
The
recent conversation about Kyle Busch matching Morgan Shepherd’s nearly
30-year-old streak of finishing in the Top 10 for the first 11 races of a
season led me – in a really roundabout way – to another Top 10 streak that, in
its own way, ought to be remembered as well.
Set
the Wayback Machine to 1965, when a local racer could build or buy a Grand
National/Cup car for affordable money and try his luck against Junior, Ned,
Richard and David (the latter two only after the Chrysler boycott ended) and
the other NASCAR stars. It also was when Big Bill France, having temporarily
given up on making his traveling circus a truly national show, was focusing on
racing in the Southeast but running a week or two of races above the
Mason-Dixon Line in mid-summer – the “Northern Tour.” That encouraged some
Yankee hot-shoes to try their luck.
One
was a Connecticut racer named Dick Dixon, who in ’65 ran eight Grand National
events: a threesome of North Carolina races the weekend after Memorial Day,
three races on the Northern Tour, and consecutive events near summer’s end at
Moyock, N.C., and Beltsville, Md. (I think we know where his vacation time went
that year.)
Dick Dixon’s Fords were always “8-ball”
numbered. This photo, attributed by Dave Fulton to Randy Gilbert when used it
previously, is said to be Dixon at Harris, N.C., where he finished third in
late May 1965.
In
the first race of his Grand National season, Dixon finished 20th at
Shelby, N.C., but he didn’t finish outside the Top 10 for the rest of the year
– seven straight finishes, five of them in the Top 5.
OK,
first, they weren’t consecutive, they weren’t at the beginning of the year, and
they were in the days when you could notch a Top 5 without finishing on the
lead lap. But think about this Yankee driver taking consecutive third-place
finishes on consecutive days at New Asheville and Harris Speedways, 800 miles
from home, probably with very few resources at his disposal.
On
the Northern Tour, he finished fifth, sixth and fifth at Manassas, Old Bridge
and Islip. To wrap it all up, he traveled to Moyock, N.C. (just below Virginia
Beach) and finished eighth on a Tuesday night and, after driving to Beltsville
Wednesday, came home fourth there.
He
never tried it again, maybe because all those good finishes earned him a TOTAL
of $2,215. Even 35-cent gasoline and volunteer crew members doesn’t make that
enough to pay the bills. Still, I think we need to remember when a racer could
accomplish that on grit, determination, talent and a few dollars.
Sadly,
Dick Dixon lost his life less than two years later in a Memorial Day Weekend
crash at Thompson Speedway in his native state, but he’s in a Hall of Fame or
two up that way, which should help preserve the memory of a driver whose name
might be more widely remembered today if he’d gotten the chances some others
did.
Dick Dixon in a classic modified.
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One of
those bygone era racers whose memory should not be allowed to fall through the
cracks.