More Bluegrass Than Green Flags For NASCAR In Kentucky
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07/05/2016 Frank Buhrman |
I remember working in the Infield Media Center about 15 years ago when somebody from Kentucky Speedway dropped off media kits for the track they were sure was about to be added to the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit. I remember thinking about all those new speedways popping up in Nashville, St. Louis, Pikes Peak and Memphis (not to mention the one at Disney World) and thinking, “nice-looking place, but is this really going to happen?”
A little more than a decade later, it did – and Kentucky was alone among those tracks in accomplishing that feat – but it took more than original owner Jerry Carroll’s nice media kit and various pleadings (both legal and otherwise). It took Bruton Smith. Today Kentucky Speedway flies the flag of Speedway Motorsports, along with the figurative flag that says it’s a Sprint Cup track.
This weekend’s race will be the sixth for NASCAR’s top series at Kentucky Speedway. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s only the seventh race ever for the Grand National/Winston Cup/Nextel Cup/Sprint Cup circuit.
Thanks for Racing-Reference.info, we can travel back in time to the only “Cup” event in the Bluegrass State that wasn’t run in Sparta. On August 29, 1954, the “stars and cars of NASCAR” (as the late Ray Melton used to say) ran a 200-lap event at Corbin Speedway. Lee Petty bested Hershel McGriff, Buck Baker, Herb Thomas and Herb’s brother Don for the win. Only Petty and McGriff were on the lead lap at the end.
A little more than a decade later, it did – and Kentucky was alone among those tracks in accomplishing that feat – but it took more than original owner Jerry Carroll’s nice media kit and various pleadings (both legal and otherwise). It took Bruton Smith. Today Kentucky Speedway flies the flag of Speedway Motorsports, along with the figurative flag that says it’s a Sprint Cup track.
This weekend’s race will be the sixth for NASCAR’s top series at Kentucky Speedway. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s only the seventh race ever for the Grand National/Winston Cup/Nextel Cup/Sprint Cup circuit.
Thanks for Racing-Reference.info, we can travel back in time to the only “Cup” event in the Bluegrass State that wasn’t run in Sparta. On August 29, 1954, the “stars and cars of NASCAR” (as the late Ray Melton used to say) ran a 200-lap event at Corbin Speedway. Lee Petty bested Hershel McGriff, Buck Baker, Herb Thomas and Herb’s brother Don for the win. Only Petty and McGriff were on the lead lap at the end.
Petty won $1,000, which might have made the trek from Level Cross worthwhile, but the guy I feel sorry for was John Smith of Baltimore, who finished 11th in his 1949 Plymouth (under the right circumstances, I guess it was OK to race a car to be more than three years old then). Smith finished 26 laps behind Petty and won $25. I know gas and tires and ham sandwiches didn’t cost quite as much in those days, but I’m still guessing that $25 didn’t go but so far, which might help explain why that was Smith’s only Grand National race.
I checked on Corbin Speedway today and found that it was scheduled to re-open in 2016 after three years without any action, but there’s nothing I can find to say the opening actually took place, so the jury may still be out on the only raceway other than Kentucky Speedway to host the “big boys” in that state.
While it never ran a Cup race, the track once most associated with NASCAR in Kentucky was Louisville Motor Speedway, a somewhat oddly shaped 3/8-miler that ran a handful of Busch/Xfinity and Craftsman/Camping World Truck Series races prior to Kentucky Speedway opening. Shortly after that, it was demolished. Several current Cup (Harvick, Biffle) and other traveling series (Bliss, Cook, Starr, Carl Long) racers turned laps there.
It’s not that Kentucky isn’t a good motorsports state; there are typically about two dozen ovals (according to the National Speedway Directory), plus several drag strips and a road course, but most of the ovals are dirt (and one paved track is or at least was a private club), and while that was just peachy with NASCAR back in ’54 (when 33 of the season’s 37 races were run on dirt), it’s not a plus these days.
So let’s hope Kentucky Speedway fills the seats this weekend and continues to offer Bluegrass State folks a good look at NASCAR’s best. Otherwise, the alternative is racing with a different kind of parity: each entrant has exactly 1 horsepower.
(Odd Notes: The Corbin, Ky., race in 1954 followed a GN event on a mile dirt track in San Mateo, Calif., and came a week before the Southern 500 at Darlington, so actually Lee Petty had to spend more money on gas than just the trip from Level Cross. Largely forgotten is the race six weeks later at NASCAR’s dirt superspeedway, the 1.5-mile Memphis-Arkansas Speedway in LeHi, Ark. That 250-miler had the season’s second highest purse after Darlington (the notoriously stingy Bill France paid only the sixth-highest purse of the year at Daytona, also trailing the mile dirt ovals at San Mateo, Raleigh, N.C., and Langhorne, Pa.) and drew 62 starters. The LeHi track closed in 1957, but you can still see its outline clearly on satellite photos of the LeHi area. Hershel McGriff ran the full Grand National circuit in 1954, won four races and finished sixth in points. He could have gotten a ride in one of Carl Kiekhaefer’s Chryslers the next year, but he decided to go back to the West Coast and tend to his family and business. He drove his last race in what is now the K&N West Series in 2012 at age 84.)
(Editor’s note) Clicking here will take the reader to a page from the Arkansas Traveler of Little Rock that gives interesting details on the Memphis-Arkansas Speedway, complete with Google Earth mapping. However, the link given for race results has gone dead. Instead, please click here for those results.
It’s not that Kentucky isn’t a good motorsports state; there are typically about two dozen ovals (according to the National Speedway Directory), plus several drag strips and a road course, but most of the ovals are dirt (and one paved track is or at least was a private club), and while that was just peachy with NASCAR back in ’54 (when 33 of the season’s 37 races were run on dirt), it’s not a plus these days.
So let’s hope Kentucky Speedway fills the seats this weekend and continues to offer Bluegrass State folks a good look at NASCAR’s best. Otherwise, the alternative is racing with a different kind of parity: each entrant has exactly 1 horsepower.
(Odd Notes: The Corbin, Ky., race in 1954 followed a GN event on a mile dirt track in San Mateo, Calif., and came a week before the Southern 500 at Darlington, so actually Lee Petty had to spend more money on gas than just the trip from Level Cross. Largely forgotten is the race six weeks later at NASCAR’s dirt superspeedway, the 1.5-mile Memphis-Arkansas Speedway in LeHi, Ark. That 250-miler had the season’s second highest purse after Darlington (the notoriously stingy Bill France paid only the sixth-highest purse of the year at Daytona, also trailing the mile dirt ovals at San Mateo, Raleigh, N.C., and Langhorne, Pa.) and drew 62 starters. The LeHi track closed in 1957, but you can still see its outline clearly on satellite photos of the LeHi area. Hershel McGriff ran the full Grand National circuit in 1954, won four races and finished sixth in points. He could have gotten a ride in one of Carl Kiekhaefer’s Chryslers the next year, but he decided to go back to the West Coast and tend to his family and business. He drove his last race in what is now the K&N West Series in 2012 at age 84.)
(Editor’s note) Clicking here will take the reader to a page from the Arkansas Traveler of Little Rock that gives interesting details on the Memphis-Arkansas Speedway, complete with Google Earth mapping. However, the link given for race results has gone dead. Instead, please click here for those results.