INDIANAPOLIS — It was a little past dinnertime on a splendid autumn Wednesday, not a trace of October in the air. I said to my wife, “What do you think about Saturday night?”
She knew I was talking about the last Midwest date of the season for USAC sprint cars, which was scheduled at Lawrenceburg Speedway. Lawrenceburg is tucked into the southeast corner of Indiana, and already I was picturing the ride there.
Once you clear the city of Indianapolis, I-74 East carries you through 70 miles of pleasant farmland before you dip south on U.S. Route 1 for, oh, 15 miles. That last bit winds through rolling, wooded hills, and at this time of year the trees offer up shades of oranges and yellows that you never knew existed.
In the summer, the 110-mile drive to Lawrenceburg is just long enough to be boring. But that changes in the fall, when the calendar and those trees remind you that winter will soon shut everything down. That USAC show seemed like a great idea.
My wife said, “Have you seen the forecast?”
I dug out my phone and found the weather app. Generally, I curse anyone who checks the weather three or four days ahead of a weekend, unless the person checking it is me. We are all slaves to technology.
My phone screen suggested a Saturday high of 59 degrees, with temperatures likely to dip into the 40s during the race program. Instantly, that lovely drive through the foliage vanished from my mind. I saw us piling into the car after the Lawrenceburg feature and urging the heater to hurry up.
“Yeah, we’re skipping that one,” I said.
So, you think you’d like to be a race promoter or a track operator? Let’s face it, at one point or another we’ve all criticized those folks, muttering that we could do the job better ourselves.
But then you face a week like the one I just described, where all available evidence points to a night shivering in the grandstands, and you are reminded that the promoter’s world has plenty of landmines, with weather right at the top. He may not understand the science, but barometric pressure is as important to him as tire pressure is to a chassis man. But the chassis man with his air tank can dial himself in, while the promoter can’t do a thing about an approaching storm front.
And when it comes to weather, the hardest-working promoter in your region has no edge at all on the laziest one. Neither of them can hold back the rain, or the cool weather that ruins a special event in the spring or fall. Nor, for that matter, can they wish away the intense heat that in the summer of 2023 led to poor attendance at some tracks and postponements at others.
The race promoter has a lot in common with the farmer. Both can get every offseason move right, from plowing the fields to planting the seeds, but in the end they both roll the dice when it comes to weather.
If Mother Nature smiles, there are bumper crops of corn, beans and spectators; if she frowns at the wrong time, yields are low. Too many bad harvests can kill off a family farm, and too many lousy race nights can wipe out a promoter.
Sure, you can argue that this has always been the case. But the increased availability of long-term forecasts is a recent and serious development. More fans than ever are making up their minds on Mondays and Tuesdays whether they’ll be attending races on the coming weekend. And once the fan has scratched off the idea of going to the track on Saturday, that decision is too often irreversible. He and his family might schedule some other activity — a visit to grandma’s, dinner with the neighbors, whatever — that can’t be broken.
Even if the weekend brings surprising blue skies and 70-degree evenings, that fan is not walking up to the ticket window.
There’s a secondary problem involved in all this, a modern problem that legendary short-track promoters like J.C. Agajanian, Lindy Vicari and Hugh Deery never had to deal with: contagious online negativity.
Once the fickle forecast followers see that the weekend looks grim, they blanket social media with their prophecies of rain, hail and thunder. By week’s end, they have you convinced that you need to start building an ark.
Put yourself in the promoter’s shoes. He’s already on edge, watching the skies, because weather is his primary opponent. Now, he’s got the Internet screaming that he’s got no chance of running on Saturday.
Yet he still has to prep his facility just in case, tending to everything from the track surface to the sound system.
Never mind that thanks to the forecast, he’ll be lucky to fill a third of his grandstand seats. He can’t pull the plug and cancel too early, because if the bad weather shifts and his track is bathed in sunshine, he’d better be ready.
Hell hath no fury like a race fan who pulls into a dry parking lot at 5 p.m. only to find that the promoter got jumpy and called things off at noon. The unfair treatment that promoter got from the social-media gnats prior to the event will feel like a soft kiss next to the pummeling he’s about to receive.
Sure, promoting is easy. Go ahead, have a crack at it.
This story appeared in the Oct 11, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
