Editor’s note: Often times I get so busy traveling from one week to the next during the heart of the trackchasing season that I can’t post a review from every track I visit. Now that I have a little spare time I will share my experiences from some of those trips that were bypassed earlier this year. I hope you enjoy the read.
Click these links for some racing highlights from these two speedways.
I wasn’t planning to go in trackchasing anywhere this weekend. That was until some of our family plans for Father’s Day changed. We have a very fluid planning process in our household. Often times the plan is unknown. Just as often the plan can change without a lot of advanced planning. I’m OK with that. I’ve come to expect it.
With my schedule freed up so to speak I decided to take a trackchasing trip out to Idaho. I had already seen racing at 25 tracks in the Gem State. My next nearest fellow competitor, not named Lewis (that’s a reference to Carol!), had seen racing at only six Idaho tracks. A 25-6 trackchaser imbalance is the biggest of any state in the country. With a little luck, I might be able to add three new Idaho tracks to my lifetime list. Nothing is ever guaranteed but it looked like I might have that opportunity. Idaho is not a very populated state. It is a rather large state geographically with each of its main population centers located a long way from the other. What implications does that bring forward? In order for me to see some racing at the Salmon Valley Speedway up in Salmon, Idaho I would need to leave my home base on Thursday evening. My plan was to fly into Salt Lake City, Utah then drive north some 373 miles to get to the very remotely located salmon, Idaho.
Thursday, June 16, 2022 My 6 p.m. flight was delayed by two hours. I’m not complaining. Only explaining. I was lucky to get the very last seat as a standby passenger on the entire plane. With the flight delay, I wouldn’t get to my hotel in Logan, Utah until 1 a.m. local time. I am never really frustrated with outcomes like this. Long ago I decided I would simply need to accept and move on from whatever frowns my travel tried to put in front of me.
Here’s the key takeaway from my approach to life. I get the chance to choose my own reaction to whatever circumstances come my way. If it rains or I run over a curb or stub my toe? I get to choose my reaction! I’m in charge. Do you feel me?
I have flown into the Salt Lake City airport hundreds of times. Nevertheless, I had not come to SLC for a couple of years, maybe since the pandemic began. In my absence, they have built and opened an entirely new airport! The airport looks futuristic.
I was surprised to see and experience a long walk from where my plane landed to where I would pick up my rental car. It easily had to be more than a mile. Easily. The new airport terminal in Salt Lake City now holds the less than proud distinction of having the “longest walk from the airline gate to the rental car center” of any airport that I have visited in the world. That’s a dubious distinction most especially for a brand new airport. Who thought that might be a good idea? I rent my cars from National Car Rental. Salt Lake City used to have the very worst National Car Rental location in the country. The operation was owned by a local Chevrolet dealer. All they had were Chevys. I’m not a huge Chevy fan. I prefer Toyota Camry rental cars.
The SLC National Car Rental group is no longer owned by a Chevy dealer. Tonight, they still didn’t have any Toyota Camry automobiles. I was bummed about that. I’m gonna be driving more than 1,000 miles in three days. I would like to have gotten a Camry with its 40 miles-per-gallon capability. As it was, I settled for a Chrysler 300. The car was all black with black wheels. It looks stealthy. It should provide a comfortable ride if not an economical one over more than 1,000 miles of driving.
I can tell you that I am starting to see electric cars show up at our nation’s rental car companies. As you know I owned a Tesla Model X SUV. I have never rented an electric car. I don’t know how they handle the charging and I don’t know what they charge for the charging. When I get the chance I will rent an electric car just for that experience. Friday, June 17, 2022 I have now made it a habit to get at least 4 miles of walking in every day. I’m happy to say that I’ve done that every day since March 2 of this year. That’s more than 3 1/2 months ago. I got up a little bit earlier than usual and got a couple of miles in walking around the hotel area. I made a stop at a Walmart Supercenter to pick up some fruits and lunch meat, my go to Nutrisystem like items for when I’ve on the road. Then…I was off to Salmon, Idaho. I’ve been trying to see racing at the Salmon Valley Speedway in Salmon, Idaho for probably more than 15 years. A couple of things have held me back.
First of all, the track is in a really remote location. Boise and Salt Lake are probably the closest major airports that have nonstop service from Los Angeles. Salmon, Idaho is about five hours of tough driving from each of those airports. Additionally, the track itself has gone in and out of business a couple of times over the past decade. Suffice it to say, this track has been hard to get to. I know that Sean, the track promoter came up from California a couple of years ago intent on revitalizing the Salmon Valley Speedway. From every indication that I’ve heard he appears to be doing a good job. Since I didn’t know what the place was like “before” it will be hard to compare its current state of operation.
Nevertheless, I will tell you in advance I came away from tonight’s track visit a little bit disappointed. First of all, I had expected to see racing on two different track configurations including their regular quarter-mile dirt oval and their inner oval that had been constructed for outlaw karts. The worst part about expectations is that missed expectations can lead to disappointment.
It’s hard not to have expectations, isn’t it? It’s fun when an experience exceeds expectations and less fun when the experience doesn’t meet your expectations. That’s when it’s important to remember that you get to choose your reaction to missed expectations! Despite all of that my reaction to missing an expectation can still be a disappointment.
When I got to the track, I mistakenly pulled into the back stretch seating location. As a senior citizen, I was only going to be charged five bucks to watch tonight. You can’t beat that. Then I realized it might be better to go over and sit on the other side of the track where I could have a grandstand seat as opposed to trying to watch from my car.
When I got seated in the grandstand I ran into a bit of a problem. During hot laps, the wind was blowing directly into the faces of the people in the main grandstand. The dirt was gritty and sandy. There weren’t that many cars on the track but the wind and dust were coming at us like a dry night at Eldora.
At about this time the track announcer began to tell the fans what the track schedule for this evening looked like. That’s always a good thing for the announcer to do. He opened with “the outlaw karts are first on the agenda but we don’t have any of them so we won’t be running outlaw karts tonight”. With that one statement, an additional track instantly disappeared from what might’ve been my lifetime list. I will tell you this. If I had been able to score two track configurations on one visit to a remote Idaho track like Salmon Valley, I would have felt like I was stealing anyway.
With the dust blowing sand into my face on the main straight I decided to relocate once again to the backstretch. The guy selling tickets on the backstretch was beginning to wonder about me! Here I watched the heat racing from seven different race classes. It was both weird and unusual to see snow-covered mountains beyond turns 3 and 4 in the last half of June! I’ve been to more racetracks in the far western states, read that pretty much Colorado and west including Hawaii and Alaska, than anybody else by a wide margin. Almost all rural far-west tracks in these states have a lot of difficulty with car counts. You can be at a rural track in Iowa and they will get 120 cars. A rural track in the far west might get 25% of that total.
With seven racing divisions competing tonight the B modifieds had the largest count with just seven. Some of the other classes had only three or four. With car counts this small it can be very likely that I will see more cars racing in a heat race than I will see you in the main event. Here were the car counts by class with my guessing at the names of each class. 5 Streets 7 B mods 6 A mods 6 Quads 4 Late models 4 Mini stocks 4 Trikes One drawback to watching on the back stretch, where I was accompanied by quite a few other fans, is they didn’t have a PA system or at least a PA system that can be heard. That wasn’t as big of a deal as you might expect because every class ran only one heat race.
Towards the end of those heat races somewhat miraculously the wind that had been blowing straight into the front stretch grandstand at about 20 miles an hour abruptly switched 180°. Now it was blowing the dust and grit at a rate of 20 mph into the faces of the fans on the backstretch including me. Oh my. That wasn’t good. My weather radar showed some green over Salmon, Idaho but there was no rain. I will be the first to tell you that I left willingly before the feature races. With the heat races finished they went to some sort of a promotion where the kids were either going to run or bike or both around the quarter-mile dirt oval. With only about 35 entries in the pit area and about 10 of those being quads and trikes, I concluded that watching 3-7 car feature events wasn’t going to be worth my time and effort. This was especially true given how far I needed to drive to get to my hotel which was still TBA at the moment. With just a twinge of sadness in my trackchasing heart, I left the Salmon Valley Speedway. Will I ever come back to see racing on their kart track? I have learned never to say never.
Tomorrow night’s track, the Mountain Home Speedway, was about a five-hour drive from Salmon. I figured I would drive for an hour or two and then catch a place where I could just pull the car over and sleep for the night. Hotels were astonishingly expensive in this part of the country. I didn’t fancy paying $150 a night for Motel 6, which was what they were going for. I kept looking for a place where I could “hide” the National Car Rental Racing Chrysler 300 as I drove along with two-lane highways of Idaho. I just couldn’t find any place that looked good. No one wants to be sitting in their rental car all by themselves in an open field in rural Idaho just waiting for some crazy mountain man to come walking out of the desert, do they? I didn’t.
I just kept driving and driving and checking my phone to see if there were any smaller hotels that might be available. I did come across some smaller hotels but they were all full. That was until my last call of the night connected me to the Thunderbird Motel (photo taken the next morning) in Mountain Home, Idaho. There I grabbed a room for 80 bucks plus tax. Every other hotel in the area was charging $150. What do you get when you rent an $80 motel room when everybody else is charging 150 bucks? Not a whole lot.
The place was safe enough and clean enough and quiet enough that $80 seemed like a reasonable price. Safe enough? The door had THREE locks but some pretty shoddy carpenter work! I went to bed after more than 10 hours of driving on some rustic almost all two-lane highways.
Saturday, July 18, 2022 I woke up this morning in the Thunderbird Motel in Mountain Home, Idaho. Most people taking a normal vacation probably would choose something other than the Thunderbird Motel. I guess there was a reason they were charging only $80 when every other hotel within 100 miles of them started at about $150 a night. Enough said.
I will tell you this. Over the years I have dramatically upgraded my hotel selection when trackchasing. I have stayed in some fleabag hotels in my time. Today it’s most;y Marriotts and Sheraton hotels using Priceline.com. The Thunderbird Motel was a step back in time and three steps back in quality. However, as explained I didn’t have much choice. I was in town for tonight’s racing at the Mountain Home Speedway. They had an Enduro race scheduled. The weather was perfect with a high temperature in the 70 to 75° range. That all sounded good. I called the track promoter a few days ago. I talked with Eric. Nice guy. He had relocated to Idaho from Minnesota. We all know that Minnesota along with South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska have the nicest people in the country. They are the “NIMS” people. Eric told me that last year, the first year the track operated, they were getting 25-35 Enduro cars. This year they started up a stock car class and that hurt the enduro car count. Eric told me he was expecting maybe 12 or 13 enduro cars. Based on my experience with track promoters “12 or 13” could just as easily be six or seven. Why do I say such a thing? Because I have talked to more track promoters than anyone reading this message. With those numbers rolling around inside my head I couldn’t resist asking Eric this question. “What if you get just six cars? Will you still race?” He said they would. He also told me that he and his family were going somewhere else this evening to participate in a demolition derby. Others would be running the track in Eric’s absence. I just hoped those other folks were as committed to running a race if they got a small car count as Eric was.
I learned a lot in Marine Corps boot camp. They had some very “rustic” sayings. One that I recall and still use to this day is, “If you hope in one hand and shit in the other which do you think will fill up first?” That is a thought-provoking question, isn’t it?
Saturday, June 18, 2022 I checked out of the Thunderbird Motel at 10:30 a.m. That seemed like an unusual checkout time. They had a lot of other unusual things about their hotel including a really bombed-out swimming pool. Since I was within just 2 miles of the Mountain Home Speedway, I figured I would go over and take a quick look at the track. I almost never ever do such a thing. I didn’t want to jinx myself.
Just across the road from the Mountain Home Speedway, I came across a place called Optimist Park. I’ve had the Optimist Park racetrack on my “possible” list for years. From what I can tell and after talking to one of their employees it looks like they only host motocross and sand drags at this location. Tonight, they were having a sand drag event at the same time the racing would take place at the Mountain Home Speedway. That probably wasn’t good for either business.
Following that visit, I looked around for something to do for the balance of the day. The capital of Idaho, Boise, was only a 40-minute drive down the I-84 freeway. I would check out Boise. What could I do in the capital? The first thing that I wanted to give a try was to go see a movie at a Regal Theater. I have a special pass with Regal where after I’ve seen two movies and paid for them all other movies for the rest of the month are absolutely free. For a guy who likes movies like I do that’s a pretty good deal.
I walked into the Edwards theater and showed them my Regal Theater app and soon I was being admitted at no charge to the current Jurassic Park movie. That’s not really my movie genre. However, the good thing about being able to see lots of free movies is you can go see stuff that you’re probably not going to like. At least it doesn’t cost anything. As predicted I didn’t care much for the movie and left midway through.
From there I did a Google search on things to do in Boise. The top-rated attraction in all of Boise surprised me. It’s the Boise River Greenbelt. This is a bike and hiking trail that goes up and down the Boise River for 725 miles. I could kill two birds with the proverbial one stone. I might mention that after saying that I am reminded of the time I was playing golf with a guy in Maui. He hit a golf shot and knocked a bird out of the air dead to the ground. He was as lethal as wind machines are reported to be!
I had a very pleasant time on the Boise River Greenbelt walk. The weather from SoCal beautiful. There were lots of people riding their bikes, rollerblading, and coasting along with their electric bikes as well. When I finished my walk along the trail I had reached 4.8 miles for the day. My next stop would be seeing the races at the Mountain Home Speedway in Mountain Home, Idaho. I feel bad for track promoters who have to work in rural areas. There just isn’t enough population to support much of a car count. Additionally, there’s just not a lot of history for auto racing in rural Idaho in general. It ain’t Iowa. That makes it tough.
Tonight’s enduro racing was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Eric, the track promoter, told me not to expect the very best racing from Mountain Home. It seems as if the stock car classes have taken cars from the enduro race car count. Last year the track focused on enduros and this year stock cars. Eric had projected 12-13 enduro cars from a high of 25-35 of last year. I expected fewer. I would come to find out there were eight enduro cars at the track tonight. I arrived a few minutes before the scheduled race time. Just across the street, they were having the sand drag competition. It looked as if the sand drags were attracting a decent crowd. Additionally, they were having a big demolition derby tonight in nearby Emmett, Idaho. I’m sure none of that helped the Mountain Home crowd or car count.
When I parked, I could see they hadn’t started racing yet. This gave me a little bit of time to sit in my car and get things organized. Then I hopped out and headed to the porta-potty. When I was finished there, I reached into my pocket to get my money and realized I didn’t have it. My money clip was back in the car. When I went back to retrieve it, I found that the engine was still running on the National Car Rental Racing Chrysler 300. Oh my. Yes, I can be a little absent-minded.
Tonight’s general admission ticket was 10 bucks. A sign told me that I could pay by cash, check, or credit. That’s pretty good service. It’s always nice to have options. Because of my “delay” back at the car I missed the first lap of the race. I hate to do that but if you make a mistake, you’re bound to have to pay for it, right?
The Mountain Home Speedway is in its second year of competition. They offer a quarter-mile slightly banked dirt oval. The dirt in this part of the country is sandy. This is high country desert. I wished the grandstand was closer to the racetrack. Just beyond the track’s backstretch there looks to be a new housing development being built. That can’t possibly turn out well. The Mountain Home Speedway may not see your five.
I liked the track announcer. He was entertaining and humorous and could be heard well over a very good PA system. The porta potties were temporary as were the concessions. They had a series of food trucks operating. One of them looked to be serving some really good Mexican food.
I walked around taking photos and videos from all different angles. Then I sat down and watched the race cars that were running dwindle one by one. At about 40 laps they took an intermission between stage one stage and two of the three stages in the event.
With an eight-car field and maybe 150 people in the stands how long should an intermission be? The intermission between stage one and stage two was nearly 50 minutes. During that time the water truck came out and soaked the track. I couldn’t think of any good reason why an intermission in this situation should be so long.
When the cars took the green flag for stage two there were only five cars running. Three had disappeared! Soon one of those five got knocked up on the interior dirt berm. Now four cars raced around a pretty muddy track. The lap time of the leader came in at 38 seconds on a quarter-mile track. Not good and not entertaining. I decided with only four or five cars remaining that I didn’t really need to stay for stage three. I do this for entertainment. I do it for fun. When the entertainment and the fun begin to lag I’m looking for other options. It’s not easy to host races at such a remote location in Idaho. They’ve got one good thing going for them. It stays light up here in the summer until nearly 10 p.m. I guess that’s why the Mountain Home Speedway didn’t have any track lighting. They don’t need it.
I’ll give the guys and gals of the Mountain Home Speedway some solid credit. They’ve come a long way in a year and a half. They’ve got a good announcer and a good PA system and some solid support from their concessionaires. I’ll guess if I had attended one of their stock car shows car counts would have been much more solid. I wish them the best of luck. That new housing development on the back stretch worries me just a bit. From the track, I gassed up, washed the windshield, and emptied out the trash. I had a four-hour drive down toward the Salt Lake City airport. I wouldn’t get there until about 1 a.m. I needed to be at the airport by no later than about 7:30 a.m. Tomorrow I hope to be flying to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Once there I will begin an international odyssey of trackchasing early next week. Wish me luck.
I did stop at an interstate rest area in Brigham City, Utah. I parked the National Car Rental Racing Chrysler 300 and slept there for the next six hours. As soon as I stopped a massive rain shower came up with a wind so strong, I thought it was going to blow the car over. That was the only rain I got on the entire trip to the American far west.
Sunday, June 19, 2022 After sleeping overnight in a highway rest area I was at the boarding gate in SLS for a non-stop flight to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I would be on the road for another eight days. I’ll tell you about that exciting adventure in a future Trackchaser Report. Stay tuned!
Randy Lewis San Clemente, California USA World’s #1 Trackchaser
