MESA, Ariz. — This is starting to sound like a broken record: Another drag strip is shutting down.
This time the casualty is Heartland Motorsports Park in Topeka, Kan. After exhaustive quarrels with Shawnee County officials and economic challenges, the Kansas capital’s historic venue will vanish from the NHRA landscape after a 34-year run.
The positive news this time is that the region already has a replacement. Scott Higgs, Blake Housley and their team in the Kansas City area broke ground in May for the Flying H Dragstrip in Odessa, Mo. The expectation is to have the addition to I-70 Motorsports Park in operation by this fall and for NHRA to include the facility on its 2024 schedule.
Heartland Park is the sixth venue that has hosted an NHRA national event to close since 2018. The others are New Jersey’s Old Bridge Township Raceway Park, Atlanta Dragway, Houston Raceway Park, Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park in Arizona and Colorado’s Bandimere Speedway.
The owners of Virginia Motorsports Park opted out of the NHRA national-event rotation and Route 66 Raceway near Chicago has been on and off the schedule for the past six years. That’s roughly one-third of the markets that have dropped off the tour or are in jeopardy.
Top Fuel racer Clay Millican said, “With the way land prices are going, you can’t be mad at some of these track owners for selling. You just can’t. The numbers that are flying around rumor-wise that these tracks are selling for, you can’t be mad at the people that are selling them.”
Then, he suggested NHRA officials try something different to fill in the gaps — eighth-mile racing for an event or two.
“There’s some eighth-mile facilities in this country that I don’t know why we couldn’t go to some of them. There are a couple out there that could hold a heck of an NHRA national event,” Millican said. “I get grief all the time on my YouTube channel: ‘I’m not watching anymore because it’s a thousand feet.’ But with some of these tracks going away, why wouldn’t we look at some of these wonderful eighth-mile facilities that are available out there?”
In an attempt to bring fans something out of the ordinary, racer advocate PRO announced in conjunction with Drag Illustrated magazine that it will sanction the Feb. 8-10 PRO Superstar Shootout invitational in Bradenton, Fla.
The event will have a $1.3 million purse, with the Top Fuel and Funny Car winners each earning $250,000 and the Pro Stock winner taking home $125,000. A chip draw, rather than the traditional bracketing, will determine who races whom.
Why are they doing it? PRO board member Tony Stewart said, “Well, why not? Why not do something big like this? We’ve seen other silos in motorsports this year and last year (that) there continues to be bigger and bigger events in motorsports. And drag racing deserves a big, big, big event. So this is an opportunity for the PRO board to do something different that’s done outside the box to really showcase the sport of drag racing by hosting a big, epic event.
“If you’re having other silos in motorsports that are doing it and you’re not doing it, there’s probably a problem,” he said. “The fact that the PRO board all united and said, ‘This is an idea that we all have’ and everybody said, ‘Yeah, we’re all in,’ this is why we’re doing this.”
He said it’s “just to create excitement, to create buzz, to show people what drag racing’s all about. This is an opportunity to introduce (people) to it before the season starts and to do something that’s never been done before.”
Naturally, some immediately criticized the project, for various reasons. But the truth is, Stewart is right. It will stir attention and raise awareness, if it is promoted properly to the uninitiated and not just to current drag-racing fans.
No one has said where the purse is coming from, and no sponsors have been mentioned, either. That leads one to believe the race is a buy-in, which is perfectly fine.
Will it grow the sport? Will it attract a new audience? Will it be the “dramatic new leap for professional drag racing” that PRO President Alan Johnson said it is?
Hopefully it will be and it will do all of those things. Is the format perfect? Who knows? It’s a baseline that always can be tweaked. It’s a start. The racers involved are charged up about it. Positive things beget positive things. So everyone should give it a chance.
This story appeared in the August 23, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
