Greetings from Edinburgh, Illinois
.
.
From the travels and adventures of the
“World’s #1 Trackchaser”
.
.
Sangcris Speedway – dirt oval
Track #1,999
ON THE WAY TO THE RACES Time to do laundry. I woke up this morning in Hannibal, Missouri. I went to bed in Columbus, Ohio. Today is day 27 of my 42-day mega trackchasing trip. This is what the day looked like. This morning would be my third laundry day of the trip. It would also be the first time I did laundry at a commercial facility as opposed to using washers and dryers in my hotels. I’m not sure if I will make it to the end of the trip with the clean clothes from today’s laundry visit. At least I am finally learning how to do a chore! Not my preference but it doesn’t seem as if I have a choice. There isn’t much time for Trackchasing Tourist Attractions on this trip. I’m averaging more than 400 miles of driving per day. I certainly don’t want to fall into the situation of my fellow competitors who rarely stop to see anything other than the racetrack. However I don’t have much choice on this trip with the tracks being so far apart for 42 straight days! Each morning I leave the hotel and head on down the trackchasing road. Do I ever get tired of this lifestyle? No! I think to myself I could do this every day for a long time. In point of fact I do this a lot and enjoy it to the max. This type of lifestyle is my passion. I wouldn’t want to do this without satellite radio. While driving I’m listening to several stations on the Sirius/XM satellite radio. Those include the channels of NASCAR, Golf, CNBC business news, CNN for general news and various PBS stations for unique interesting heart warming and entertaining personal stories. The one thing I stay away from are political talk shows. Sorry. I can’t listen to that stuff….from either side. Randy – Colin Herridge – P.J. Hollebrand Thanks Colin. Today is a pretty big day in my trackchasing life. It’s my penultimate track before hitting the magic and totally unheard of number of 2,000 tracks. That’s right I will be seeing track number 1,999 today. Thanks to Colin Herridge for teaching me the word penultimate! What’s in a number? Do you know the population of San Diego? If I told you it was 3.1 million would that surprise you? If I told you it was 1.6 million would that surprise you? You see it doesn’t really matter what San Diego’s population is. You know that San Diego is a big city and has a larger population than most American towns. Back in the day people would ask me how many tracks I had seen. Maybe the current total was “852”. Some folks would respond with “Have you seen them all this year?” At that point I knew they were not “tracking” if you know what I mean. When I talk about my trackchasing hobby with “civilians” the number of tracks I’ve seen always comes up. So when I’ve seen 2,000 and more tracks that conversation will be crazy. Why? No one can wrap his or her arms around that number. Maybe I’ll just say, “387”. If I told them I’d seen 387 tracks I believe they would raise their eyebrows and say, “Wow that’s quite an accomplishment”. Telling someone I’ve seen more than 2,000 tracks is a bit like McDonald’s saying they have sold 43 billion hamburgers. No one really knows what it takes to do something like that. Maybe in the future I’ll just tell people I’ve seen 387 tracks, get the appropriate “wow”, and move on. It will certainly be a true statement to say I’ve seen 387 tracks. It’s just that in reality I will have seen those 387 and a whole lot more. One more thing about satellite radio. On the topic of satellite radio let me tell you this. The very last thing I want to do is listen to a NASCAR Sprint Cup race on radio. I’m only doing it on this trip because I’m away from my home based DVR for such a long time. The commercials on the radio broadcast drive me crazy. They are too frequent and they repeat the same commercials too often. The commercials on the NASCAR TV broadcast drive me crazy as well but at home I don’t see any commercials during a NASCAR race. I only watch the race on a pre-recorded basis and skip past all of the ads. Secondly, every radio announcer I’ve ever heard tries to scream as if the cars racing through his particular turn are having the race of the century….for each of the 400 laps that day. I’ll listen to the broadcast today because I want to listen to the NASCAR talk shows over the next few days. They will certainly be discussing the outcome of today’s race in Pocono. THE RACING Sangcris Speedway – Edinburgh, Illinois Sangcris Speedway? Never heard of it. Today I would be visiting the Sangcris Speedway in Edinburg, Illinois. I first learned about this track a couple of weeks ago while visiting the Ealeyville Speedway in Mechanicsburg, Illinois. The funny thing about both of these tracks is that I had never heard of them prior to the beginning of the 2014 trackchasing season. So many tracks like these keep “popping up” I will never see all the tracks! I really would prefer a fixed amount of opportunities so that I could feel some sense of accomplishment of closing in on the entire group. Seems as if for every hundred tracks I see 50-60 new ones pop up. It’s sort of like two steps forward and one backward. So what did I learn from stopping at Subway? I pulled onto the speedway grounds at 2 p.m. after a stop at Subway. I’m sure I’ve stopped at Subway thousands of times. However only recently have I learned a few new things. First I can have my sandwich warmed up in the microwave as opposed to toasting it in the oven. Secondly I can have the server wrap each half of my foot-long sandwich separately so it’s easier to eat them at different times of the day. What was my take away from all of this? A person might have done something thousands of times. They may think they know just about everything there is to know about that activity. However, if a person challenges themselves they are likely to find opportunities for improvement no matter how much experience they may have with a particular activity. Build it and they will come. The Sangcris Speedway is another track similar to the Ealeyville Speedway. How is that? It seems like it’s built in a guy’s backyard! However don’t take that as a put down. The famous Eldora Speedway also sits in the backyard of its founder Earl Baltes’ in Rossburg, Ohio. I’m guessing that today’s track was about 1/10 of a mile in length. The oval is covered with a dirt-racing surface that is nicely banked in the turns. The track has lights and a PA system. However the announcer only uses the PA to communicate with the pit area to tell the drivers which group is racing next. They do have a small set of grandstands that was home to 10-15 people today. I watched from the air-conditioned comfort of my rental car with temperatures on a very sunny day of 86° or so. When I arrived at 2 p.m. they were holding the drivers meeting. I knew in advance after talking to the promoter “Tommy G” that each class would run two heats and a feature. That is somewhat standard for these smaller kart shows with 2-6 competitors in each class. No admission price; no winged karts? There was no admission for spectators. I’m not sure what a pit pass would cost today. From my position on the spectating side I couldn’t really see the full pit area to determine how many racers were in attendance today. It didn’t look like that many. At the outset I didn’t see any of the winged karts that I was hoping would be there. However when I saw the flagman coming my way I asked him about the winged karts. He told me there were six of those and two other outlaw type karts. It’s the littlest of news that can make my day at times. That’s all I needed to know so as to have a happy and fruitful Sunday afternoon. Had the show begun? Soon the karts came out for their first activity on the track. They lined up in race formation took the green flag, ran for a few laps and then got the checkered flag. All this activity certainly looked like real racing to me. However without a PA system to inform me about the racing details I couldn’t tell for sure. Just as Willie the starter had told me there were six nice-looking adult caged karts. They were also 2 QRC type outlaw karts. Several flat kart classes joined these two classes and one other caged kart group driven by “juniors”. Some folks could be fooled. Some of our trackchasers have a propensity to leave the track very quickly after arriving. I’m talking about those chasers who stay for 30 minutes or less. If someone did that today they might have only seen practice sessions, which looked like races. The first 10 or so “races” that I saw were in reality simply very formal practice sessions. They sure looked like races but they weren’t. Following these “hot laps” they watered the track briefly and ran it in. Then the real racing started. I stayed for one complete set of heat races. I think you’ll enjoy the video of what rural kart racing looks like in my boyhood state of Illinois. When I looked at the clock it read 4:30 p.m. I had been at this car track for 2 1/2 hours. Racing activity of one sort or another had been on the track for well over two hours of that time. This was a nice little place to visit on a Sunday afternoon. The Sangcris Speedway came oh so close to trackchasing immortality. The Sangcris Speedway was a special track for another reason as well. This was lifetime track number 1,999. If the Kankakee County Fairgrounds hadn’t run the first ever figure 8 demolition derby that I had ever seen then the Sangcris Speedway would have gone down in history as being the first “Track #2,000” ever recorded. AFTER THE RACES Continuous improvement. As I drive up and down the interstate highways of America I like to work on my golf game. I bring along a swing fan resistance training aid. It is designed to increase my club head speed. I am a very straight driver of the golf ball. However my swing speed is exceedingly slow. I’m hoping with daily use of my golf training aid that I can increase that club head speed. The distance that a golf ball is driven is really dependent upon only two things. The first is club head speed and the second is hitting the ball as close to the center of the club as possible. Pothole paradise. I am very much surprised at the terrible road conditions I’m finding all over the Midwest. I know the winter takes it’s toll but the deferred maintenance is significant. I’m a product of the Midwest. Nevertheless when I come back here I see a good deal of age creeping in on the region. It’s interesting to see that cars still rust out here as well. I would’ve thought that carmakers might have figured out how to rustproof their cars well enough to prevent that from happening. It’s better than it used to be but I still see quite a few cars with major rust damage. Following this afternoon’s race in central Illinois I headed eastward. I was thinking I might be able to find a track that was racing this evening. If so I would stop to catch a feature or two. I used Tim Frost’s Track Guide for that purpose. It didn’t matter to me if I had seen a race at the track before or not. It would just be fun to make a revisit. However there just aren’t that many tracks racing on Sunday nights anymore. As a matter of fact they are getting to be fewer and fewer tracks racing weekly. I did see a large amount of westbound traffic heading out of Indianapolis. I assumed this would be racers traveling home from a major drag racing event in Indy. I miss this part. Since all most all racecars are transporter in unmarked haulers nowadays it’s difficult to know what’s inside those trailers. I miss seeing the racecar being towed down the road on an open trailer. I know that most real short track racing fans feel the same way. Now if I see you racer being hauled on an open trailer I pretty much know it’s a figure 8 or demo car! Illinois The Illini state This afternoon I saw my 91st lifetime track in the Illini state, yes the Illini state. Ed Esser still leads in Illinois with 99 tracks. Thanks for reading about my trackchasing, Randy Lewis World’s #1 Trackchaser Peoria Old Timers Racing Club (P.O.R.C.) Hall of Fame Member Illinois sayings: Most of our governors spend their golden years in prison. QUICK FACTS AIRPLANE Los Angeles, CA (LAX) – Chicago, IL (ORD) – 1,745 miles RENTAL CAR #1 O’Hare (Chicago) International Airport – trip begins Charlotte, MI Cortland, OH Davisburg, MI Davisburg, MI Mechanicsburg, IL Harlan, IA Primghar, IA Knoxville, IA Bucyrus, OH O’Hare (Chicago) International Airport – trip ends – 3,516 miles RENTAL CAR #2 O’Hare International Airport – trip begins Carlyle, IL St. Louis International Airport – trip ends – 412 miles RENTAL CAR #3 St. Louis International Airport – trip begins Hastings, MI Greenfield, IA Atchison, KS David City, NE Dighton, KS Malvern, IA Eldon, MO St. Louis International Airport – trip ends – 2,760 miles Editor’s note: The above did involve three different rental car contracts. However, I did it all with the SAME car. When I pulled in for the final time to the St. Louis airport the car was huffing and puffing. In 15 days I had driven it 6,688 miles. RENTAL CAR #4 Denver International Airport – trip begins Powell, WY Plentywood, MT Crary, ND Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Canada Denver International Airport – trip ends – 3,044 miles RENTAL CAR #5 O’Hare (Chicago) International Airport – trip begins Marion, IL Donnellson, IA Edinburgh, IL TRACK ADMISSION PRICES: Eaton County Fairgrounds – $10 Trumbull County Fairgrounds – $4 Oakland County Fairgrounds – oval – $10 ($10 to park!) Oakland County Fairgrounds – figure 8 – $10 ($10 to park….again!) Ealyville Speedway – Complimentary pit pass Shelby County Speedway – $5 Primghar Raceway – $5 Knoxville Raceway – Complimentary admission Crawford County Fairgrounds $10 ($5 fair; $5 grandstand) Clinton County Fairgrounds – $10 Barry County Expo – $13 ($3 fair; $10 grandstand) Adair County Fair – $6 Atchison County Raceway – $12 Butler County Fairgrounds – $10 Lane County Fairgrounds – $10 Mills County Fairgrounds – $10 Miller County Fairgrounds – $10 Parker County Fairgrounds (Night #1) – Complimentary admission Parker County Fairgrounds (Night #2) – Complimentary admission Sheridan County Fairgrounds – $10 Devil’s Lake Speedway – $20 (ouch!) Yellowhead International Speedway – $10 Canadian Southern Illinois Raceway – $10 Lee County Speedway – $12 Sangcris Speedway – No charge LIFETIME TRACKCHASER COMPARISONS The three most important trackchasing comparisons to me are: Total lifetime tracks seen Total “trackchasing countries” seen Lifetime National Geographic Diversity results Total Lifetime Tracks There are no trackchasers currently within 400 tracks of my lifetime total. Don’t blame me. Total Trackchasing Countries There are no trackchasers currently within 10 countries of my lifetime total. Current lifetime National Geographic Diversity results That’s all folks! Official end of the RLR – Randy Lewis Racing Trackchaser Report Click on the link below for a photo album from today’s trackchasing day: A nice Sunday afternoon at this little kart track. 
