CONCORD, N.C. — Sprint car racing may be an uncommon spectacle in Kentucky, but both Bluegrass State tracks set to host the American Sprint Car Series National Tour next month are making major preparations for the arrival of the best in the country.
Windy Hollow Speedway is a three-eighths-mile oval located in Owensboro, Ky., set to host its first touring winged sprint car event of any kind with the arrival of ASCS next Friday, May 9.
In February, track staff broke ground on a new track renovation project that primarily restored the circuit to its original three-eighths-mile size, increased the backstretch and banking in the corners, and erected a new wall and catchfence through Turns 3–4.
The following day, the Tour heads two hours west to Paducah, Ky., for a visit to Paducah Int’l Raceway on Saturday, May 10.
In early April, the high-banked, three-eighths-mile oval was flooded by torrential rainstorms, leaving several feet of water standing throughout the property.
The flood water has since completely drained and track crews are well into the preparation for the ASCS’ third appearance at Paducah.
Despite the situations the tracks have faced, both will be ready to and are eager to host the ASCS National Tour on Mother’s Day weekend. The way Windy Hollow promoters Trevor Hutchins and Misty Westerfield see it, ASCS is the shining jewel on their 2025 events lineup and are preparing like never before to ensure it happens.
“For us, as far as the track, it will be the biggest show we’ve ever held,” Hutchins said.
“We have had a huge response from it, spectator-wise,” Westerfield said. “I feel like it will be a really big event because it’s something they don’t see around our area a lot.”
Opened in 1975, Windy Hollow has operated for many years as a weekly race place for several common fender car classes including Street Stocks, Crate-engine Late Models and four-cylinder stock cars.
Despite the track’s longstanding presence, few traveling racing series have made appearances at the venue — one of the many factors that sparked the track renovation project.
“We’re hoping with doing all these renovations and making all the track improvements with the proper track prep, the walls and the fencing, we can hold so many more bigger events,” Westerfield said. “That was our goal when we went into this project.”
In early February, construction crews began loading in heavy equipment and moving dirt around the landscape, digging up Turns 3 and 4 and the entire backstretch. Their primary objectives were to reshape the track back to its original three-eighths-mile size, increase the banking through those areas and install a new outside retaining wall.
“We figured out that the racetrack, over the last 40–50 years, had widened out to a half mile, and when it did that, we lost all of our banking in the backstretch,” Hutchins said. “There was maybe a degree or two of banking in our backstretch, so it was very flat. Over the last 20 years, everybody’s just been adding dirt to the race track and there’s been no wall to hold the dirt in.
“We thought if we bring the race track back into the true, three-eighths-mile that it is, we could put a lot of the banking back into the race track and it’s going to make for better racing.”
In addition, a new drainage pipe was installed in the infield, and new dirt was brought in to fill the area of the pond that formerly sat in the infield.
With the renovations now complete, all focus turns to the arrival of ASCS on May 9. The track expects a big crowd not only to see the new improvements but an exclusive night of racing as well — something they hope will spur local business and grow into something larger in the future.
“We’ve never had sprint cars, so they’re really looking forward to this deal because they know it’s going to draw so many people into the community that normally wouldn’t come to Owensboro,” Hutchins said.
When the National Tour makes its return to Paducah the following night, it will be only the second show back since the flood that halted local competition in early April.
Competition Director Steve Ariana recalls the massive amount of rain that fell from April 2–5.
“I think the area around the track got somewhere between 15–16 inches of rain in four days,” Ariana said. “There was just too much water.”
When the storms passed, the race track was left with an estimated 15–18 feet of standing water from its lowest point in the infield, in addition to several feet in the pits and parking lot. Local flooding from the nearby Ohio River backed the water up in surrounding areas with nowhere to drain, which heavily affected the race track.
“There is a drainage canal that runs behind the track that was built a long time ago by the Army Corps of Engineers and it’s just filled up with a lot of silt and everything,” Ariana said. “When it gets full, it backs up through our drain in the center of the track, and that’s really what flooded us.”
Though not much can be done once high-water levels occur, the race track has been through instances of flooding in the past and was able to prepare some beforehand that limited potential property damage.
“We got all the equipment out and moved that to higher ground,” Ariana said. “When the water came, obviously the track was flooded and the parking lot and pits, we had a pit building that floated off of its foundation. But everything else was pretty much protected.
“Once the pits went down, the parking lot went down in a couple of days, we were able to get out there and start trash cleanup, put the building back in place, check the power and make sure that was OK, check the scales and some other things. We really mitigated any kind of damage to the whole infrastructure. We just basically had to wait this time for the water to go down inside the track.”
