Greetings from first Clanton, Alabama
From the travels and adventures of the
“World’s #1 Trackchaser”
Buck Shot Speedway Dirt oval Lifetime Track #2,771 THE EVENT Editor’s note: I’ve down to about the last twenty. The last twenty what? I have only about 20 of America’s permanent oval racetracks left to see. I have averaged more than 100 new tracks visits over the past 24 years. That means that twenty oval tracks left to see is almost ZERO! There will be temporary “pop-up” tracks to visit. It’s just that I’ve seen almost all of our nation’s permanent tracks…but not the Buck Shot Speedway until tonight. I travel this way so you don’t have to…even though secretly you probably want to. How does that work? I tell you how I travel and then you get to decide if that’s a good idea for you. Welcome to my 2022 trackchasing season! I AM A TRACKCHASER. What’s a trackchaser? What is trackchasing? Trackchasing is a hobby of mine. With trackchasing I do just three things. Each one is of equal importance to me. I travel the world watching auto racing on ovals, road courses and figure 8 tracks. I seek out “Trackchasing Tourist Attractions” during my travels to keep myself entertained when I’m not at the racetrack. I’ve been able to see the world doing this. If you’re interested in exactly what I’ve been able to experience all around the U.S. and the world I recommend you click on this link. Trackchasing Tourist Attractions I plan airline, rental car and hotel accommodations to get me from my home in Southern California to racetracks located in the United States and all over the world. Just the planning part of my hobby is as much fun as anything. I am known as the “World’s #1 Trackchaser”. How did I get that title? I have traveled to 85 different countries and seen racing at nearly 2,800 tracks…that’s how I got that title. If you’re interested in looking back and seeing where I’ve been the following link is for you. If you’ve got a question, comment or whatever please leave it at the bottom of this report. It’s very easy to do. Or you can visit me on Facebook. Thanks! FOREWORD Thursday/Sunday, March 24-27, 2022. This trip was meant to be a basketball trip. No trackchasing involved whatsoever. However, in life things change. When things change, I change. This was the fourth consecutive weekend that I have followed UCLA basketball all over the country. Carol and I saw UCLA finish their season with a victory over their dreaded rival usc at Pauley Pavilion up in Los Angeles. That was four weekends ago. The next weekend Carol and I traveled to Las Vegas to see our UCLA Bruins play in the Pac-12 tournament. They won two games and lost one advancing to the NCAA basketball tournament. Last week I ventured up to Portland, Oregon to see UCLA play in the first round of the NCAA tournament. They defeated Akron and Saint Mary’s of California and moved onto the “sweet 16”. This weekend the plan was to go to Philadelphia to see UCLA play North Carolina. I would be joining my son J.J. and his two fraternity brothers Brian and Devin. We all took our own way to the City of Brotherly Love. Soon we found ourselves at the Gatehouse at Navy Yard restaurant in Philadelphia. The eatery was just up the street from the Wells Fargo Arena. This highly rated restaurant lived up to its billing. Before I go any further, I might take a moment just to summarize the situation. It takes a good deal of financial wherewithal and fanboy wherewithal to make and take these trips. I realize that financially not everyone can do what I’m able to do. I attribute that primarily to my being fortunate and having an interest in finance. With that I have the ability to accrue the needed funds and then spend them just about anywhere I want. I also acknowledge the idea that a lot of people have a lot more money than I do. Most of those people don’t have any interest in traveling long-distances to see college basketball games. No harm no foul. See what I just did there? However, I have the financial wherewithal and the desire to go on these adventures which is what makes these trips, for me, so much fun. THURSDAY I actually ended up flying into Washington D.C. and renting a car to begin my part of the travel itinerary. I stayed overnight in Baltimore. FRIDAY On Friday morning I drove down to Philadelphia to join my fellow Bruin basketball fans. The guys and I had a great dinner at the Navy Yard. My meal was a “Diet Coke” and that was it. My companions chowed down on some excellent and delicious looking appetizers. I continued on week four of my Nutrisystem eating plan. Please don’t think the Nutrisystem eating plan consists only of drinking Diet Coke! It’s just that I had to ration out my remaining calories over the next two basketball games following everyone else’s dinner. With Nutrisystem I like to say “I won’t get fat and I won’t starve to death”. I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? I’m hoping Nutrisystem doesn’t try to steal my slogan. By the way you can compare both photos of my wearing the hooded UCLA sweatshirt, taken one month apart. I think Nutrisystem is working but I have a long way to go. J.J. (center) is a big donor to the UCLA football and basketball programs. This gives him the inside track on getting really good seats at face value prices when UCLA goes to bowl games or basketball tournaments. Today, with J.J.’s generosity, we were allowed to get into the game for the face value of the ticket which was $160. Seats in our location at the Wells Fargo Arena were going for $1,000 via online ticket brokers. We were just 23 rows from the court between the baskets. We started the evening by watching a super exciting game between Saint Peter’s University (Peacocks) and third seeded Purdue University (Boilermakers). Saint Peter’s, the big underdog, ended up squeaking out a victory over the Boilermakers much to the delight of most of the 20,000 people in attendance. At intermission I went down to buy “Sweet 16” souvenir t-shirts for our group plus 1, which would be Carol. A Purdue fan began to chat me up. He had come to the game tonight to see his alma mater play. The Purdue fan lived in a nearby suburb of Philadelphia. He was beyond amazed that my crew and I had traveled all the way cross country from Los Angeles “just to see a basketball game”. Don’t worry. It’s what we do. Between games I had the chance to visit with Ann Forkey, an alumnus of Procter & Gamble as I am. She and I worked in the Los Angeles area together for a few years. That was more than 20 years ago. We have stayed in touch over that time. As a graduate of UCLA, Ann is more than willing to hop on a jet airplane and go follow the Bruins all over United States. How many “girls” would do that? As a matter fact, Ann is a big international traveler and has a huge trip coming up in a few weeks. It was great seeing Ann. I hope she has major fun on her trip. I’m sure she will. We were going to have a tough game against North Carolina. They have really improved this year and beaten some big-name teams before they matched up with us. On the one hand, I’m happy to report that we lead virtually the entire game until the last couple of minutes. Then our shots didn’t fall and their shots did. We ended up losing. That was a bummer. Just getting into the NCAA tournament is an accomplishment. Only 68 teams out of about 350 make it. Then 67 of those 68 teams end their season with a loss. Last year we made it to the Final Four. We had a great season. The entertainment that the UCLA basketball Bruins provided us was worth several times what I paid for my season tickets. I did have a back-up plan in case the Bruins lost this game. Our game ended at 11:51 p.m. tonight. That was good timing in a sense. I had two more nights of hotel reservations reserved in Philadelphia just in case we had won the game and would be playing on Sunday. I had to cancel those rooms before midnight tonight in order not to be charged extra. At 11:51 p.m. I hit the “cancel” button. That officially meant the remainder of my Philadelphia trip was scuttled. I had also thought ahead to reserve a rental car in Atlanta, Georgia. I get great prices on rental cars from National Car Rental. They guarantee me a car if I reserve at least 24 hours in advance. However, sometimes cars are not available inside 24 hours thus the advance reservation. From downtown Philly I took an Uber back to my hotel which was located near the Philadelphia airport. Because of the basketball game demand for Uber driver’s prices were extra high. That is called “surge” pricing. It cost me $18 to take Uber down to the restaurant. The drive back after the game was a similar distance but the price was $43. Things were what they were. On the ride back to the hotel the Uber driver made a request that I had never heard in any of my previous Uber trips. Can you guess what that was? He asked if I minded if he smoked a cigarette in the car. I don’t care for smoking at all. I have never ever had a single puff of a cigarette. When I was a kid, my parents smoked like crazy and often as I was traveling with them in the car. However, I was in a mellow mood, despite our team having lost the basketball game. I told him that his having a smoke would be fine. Then I began to wonder what my answer would be to Carol when I returned home and she asked, “Why do your clothes smell like smoke?” Oh well, sometimes but not always, it’s better just to go with the flow and let others enjoy themselves. I sort of felt he needed a cigarette more than I needed clean smelling clothes. On other occasions I likely would have declined his request. I got back to the hotel at 1:30 a.m. I had a big puzzle to figure out. At 1:30 a.m. after traveling from last night’s hotel in Baltimore, walking four miles and sitting through two energy draining basketball games in Philadelphia I didn’t feel like figuring out a huge puzzle…but I had too. What was the puzzle? I needed to figure out a way to get from Philly to some unknown location in time to drive 100-200 miles and arrive at a racetrack that I had never visited before. Where would I begin with this puzzle. I started by looking at all of the new track trackchasing opportunities that I had for tomorrow, Saturday. This being March (cold weather) and this being the fact that I had already seen 2,770 (fanatic) of the world’s racetracks the pickings were slim. I had just 6-7 choices. Most were in the southeast and one was in Texas. I would have to fly somewhere but where? I would be flying standby. This was spring break time for schools. That’s when parents take their little rug rats to Disneyworld and every other place just to keep the little brats entertained. Flights are packed during spring break just like at Christmas and Thanksgiving. The worst thing about spring break from a standby flyer’s point of view is that spring break lasts for six weeks! I check the flight “loads” for several airlines and used an app to find the loads for flights where I couldn’t check directly myself. One leading flight option had me flying to Wilmington, Delaware for a race in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Then I realized that flying FROM Wilmington back to Los Angeles tomorrow could be problematic. I continued to look at my options. There were three or four tracks racing within a three or four driving range of Atlanta, Georgia. If I could get to Atlanta from Philly then getting home from Atlanta to Los Angeles would be easier. Soon I found a track racing in Clanton, Alabama. I checked the weather in Clanton. No rain! Then I checked flights that might work for a standby flyer. Most of the flights were full with paying passengers. However, there was ONE flight scheduled for a 7:10 a.m. departure. That flight had 30 unsold seats. That was it. Puzzle solved. Now it time to begin implementing the plan. Often times it’s a heck of a lot easier to come up with the plan than it is to DO the plan. It was now past 2 a.m. I would have to catch the 5:20 a.m. hotel shuttle in order to get over to the airport and check-in for my flight. I have one of the very best “flight schedule” apps I’ve ever discovered. It’s called “Flightview” (above). Flightview told me my 7:10 a.m. flight was delayed by one hour. You can’t imagine how much I wanted to take that one-hour flight delay and invest it in another hour of sleep. But…isn’t there always a “but” in so many good plans? But flight delays are not guaranteed. If I slept an extra hour and then the flight went out on time I would be screwed. I couldn’t chance that. In order to get a FULL three hours of hotel sleep I did much of my normal “morning checkout” stuff before I went to bed. I filled my clothes travel bag and zipped it tight with just tomorrow’s clothes within easy reach. I took all of my electronics, i.e., laptop, iPad, Apple watch, Air pods and iPhone and either packed them away or put them next to my bed. I would also forego my normal morning cleanup routine. No shower. No shave. My deodorant would need to last another day. This would save me nearly 30 minutes. I was going to bed at 2:20 a.m. I had only left California’s Pacific Time Zone thirty-six hours earlier. On “my” time zone I was going to bed at 11:20 p.m. but getting up at 2:20 a.m. Say what? I was going to bed at 2:20 a.m. Eastern time but I was getting up at 2:20 a.m. Pacific time? Thinking about that hurt my brain! SATURDAY When I landed in Atlanta, it was only 10 a.m. Racing over in Alabama was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. The drive from Atlanta to Clanton, Alabama would take me about three hours. That being the case I stopped in a “Minute Suites” for an hour of sleep in the Atlanta airport. Minutes Suites are a “rent a room” at the airport idea. You can rent these small spaces by the hour for $48 an hour. Or you can rent them overnight for eight hours for $179. In my world that’s pretty expensive but it doesn’t prevent me from participating with Minute Suites. One of my credit cards offers the Priority Pass program. With Priority Pass I can stay in a Minute Suites location for an hour at no charge. That hour of sleep meant a lot today! Around noon I’ve ventured out to the National Car Rental lot. Nowadays most rental car company offerings mirror the general public’s preferences for automobiles. What does that mean? Car rental inventories are made up mainly of SUVs and not traditional sedan automobiles. When I see a rental car SUV the phrase “gas guzzler” pops into my head. Although I drive an SUV (electric) at home I don’t want one when I’m making long drives on the road. My favorite rental car is the Toyota Camry. It’s in the full sized category. I can rent these cars for about $50-$55 a day which is well below market price. I’ll end up getting about 40 miles a gallon in fuel mileage with a Toyota Camry. However, when I showed up at the lot today, they didn’t have any Camrys but only SUVs. I was going to be driving more than 400 miles. I didn’t really want a gas hog for my rental car. I stopped one of the agents and asked if they might be able to look in the “wash lot” for a Camry. They did. In less than five minutes a Toyota Camry with only 1,300 miles on the odometer pulled up in front of my luggage. I was set to go. Remember…” If you don’t ask; you don’t get”. I had about six hours to make my three-hour drive. I figured I would stop in some of the highway rest areas and cat nap. If I was lucky, I might also find a Trackchasing Tourist Attraction along the way. I was lucky. I saw a sign along the highway that mentioned Tuskegee University located in Tuskegee, Alabama. I had never been there but I had heard a lot about the Tuskegee airmen. As a youngster I read a book a long time ago about Booker T. Washington who founded Tuskegee University. I would stop there. The students at Tuskegee must have been off for spring break. I entered the campus by explaining to the guard that I simply wanted to do some sightseeing. That was OK with him. When I do these college tours, I like to search out a minimum of three items of interest. Those would be the basketball arena, the football stadium and the bookstore. If the school I am visiting has never caused UCLA any problems (like they beat us in something!) I will likely buy a t-shirt. I have a lot of t-shirts from these visits. I figured with the campus pretty well shut down the bookstore wouldn’t be open. I don’t think it was. I found the basketball arena which is called the James Center Arena. This arena was built in 1987 and seats 5,000 fans. The building looked to be locked up tight. I peaked in one of the windows. I couldn’t see much. Bummer! Then I found a door to the arena that had been left just slightly ajar. What did that mean to me? Was this a sign? Was God telling me that the folks from Tuskegee University wanted me to visit their basketball arena and share the photos with you? That’s how I took it! In I went. It wasn’t long before I was taking photos of the basketball court and the surrounding grandstands. I never met anyone while I was inside. I had my story all prepared in case I did run into someone who challenged my entry. I was only in the building for about five minutes. I didn’t take anything. I did make a mental note that I would love to see a Tuskegee basketball game someday. I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens next season. From there it was a straight shot down to the Buckshot Speedway. Well, maybe not a straight shot. I did have to get off the interstate and drive on about 15 or 20 miles of Alabama back roads. I can tell you this. Those roads weren’t in very good shape. This racetrack had opened as a 3/8-mile dirt oval track back in 1995. In the past it has been called the Central Alabama Speedway and the Chilton County Speedway. In 2022 it’s the Buckshot Speedway. Why all the name changes. Often times the short track racing world is not the most organized nor the best run nor the most profitable enterprise. That being the case some of these tracks go out of business before long. However, in many cases it doesn’t take a budding entrepreneur long to buy the place cheap and slap their own name on the sign and go racing. I’ve seen this happen literally thousands of times. The Buckshot Speedway Facebook page told me they planned to start racing “around 6 o’clock”. Have you ever gone to a movie that was scheduled to begin “around 6 o’clock”? My favorite baseball team is the Los Angeles Angels. They often advertise a start time of 7:07 p.m. and you can bet they will begin on time. What does “around 6 o’clock” in race promoter talk? It might and often does mean 8 o’clock! I was going to find out soon. The Buckshot Speedway general admission price was $10. A pit pass was $30. That’s another unique thing about short track racing. They charge the competitors to play even though the racers are the entertainment. Who knows? Maybe the Lakers charge Lebron James a small fee to play on their court at Crypto.com Arena formerly known as Staples Center! The track’s parking area was a random mess on some very uneven and sandy ground. I saw people boxing others in. I didn’t want that to happen to me. I drove around a bit and ended up deciding to park outside of the parking lot fenced in area. That way if I needed to leave early, which I expected to, I wouldn’t be stuck. I also noticed that maybe half of the crowd or more was parked around the fence surrounding turns one and two of the 3/8 mile high banked oval track. They were here for the long term. Later in the evening when it got dark and cold several of these folks built fires. They knew what they were doing. The regular grandstand seating was a little bit limited. They had a series of well-worn wooden stands that might have gone six or seven rows high. These were pretty well occupied and difficult to get into and out of. For the most part I walked around and gathered photos and videos from wherever I could. Sometimes I went out where the fans were watching from their cars and trucks around turns one and two and snuck a peek from there. One fellow leaning over his bond fire even offered me one of his camping chairs. I would have to say that overall, I was disappointed in the product coming out of the Buckshot Speedway. The admission price was reasonable. The parking and viewing opportunities were poor. Car counts on this opening night were small. Why would that be? It is normal for some racers not to have their cars ready to go on the first night of the season. Yes, they have had all winter to get things together. In many of those cases life for them got in the way of getting their stock car race ready. Prize money for these races is very small to non-existent. It costs a lot of money to race. You have the car itself, the engine, tires, maintenance, fuel to get to the track, pit passes and a whole lot more. I noticed that car counts took a big dip during the 2008 financial crisis and have never really come back. There were several classes racing tonight. Why have so many classes when each class commonly has less than 10 entries. Racers like to race at different levels. These levels range all the way from the brand new driver just getting his/her feet wet in junk cars to the cars, drivers and owners with $30,000 engines racing for $600 to win. Tonight’s classes featured “602” late models and “604” late models, open wheeled modifieds, factory stocks and the buzz class. The late models had really small car accounts which averaged about four or five over their two classes. There were eight open wheeled modifieds. The announcer seemed to refer to the factory stocks and buzz class as “four-cylinders” and “six-cylinders”. The PA system wasn’t very good. The announcer (above NOT the announcer at the Buck Shot Speedway) only referred to the racers by the name of the class. In the couple hours that I watched the racing I don’t think I heard him say the name of a single driver all night. That was most unusual. I’m not sure I can ever recall that happening. The starting procedure for the races was a little weird as well. It seemed like they would have the cars lineup and give them the green flag. They would race for a lap or two. Then the yellow light would come on and they would restart the race from there. I couldn’t tell if this was some form of practice lap or what. Most practice laps in advance of the green flag of a race do not have the cars all lined up just like it was the start of a real race. The announcer told us that after track packing and hot laps that we would be taking a “intermission” before “heat laps” began. That was an unusual way of saying things. Maybe this announcer wasn’t all that familiar with auto racing. I do believe the track announcer is the most important employee for the fan at the track. The announcer has the chance to create the “drama” that most fans are looking for. I don’t see very many tracks taking intermission before the heat races begin. I hope I never do. At this point as it began to get colder. I noticed I was the only fan in the entire place wearing shorts. I decided that my objective was to see every car race in at least one race. I believe I achieved that. There really wasn’t any good racing. Because of the low car counts most of the races would have exactly the same racers in the feature, and maybe less due to mechanical problems, as the heat races. They were quite a few yellow flags for stalled cars and spins. It took them a while to get the safety equipment out there to fix things. I have seen every permanent oval track and permanent road course track in the United States with the exception of about twenty. Most of these twenty are not venues that you’ve ever heard of. In most cases if you’ve never heard of a track, they are not exactly known for their short track racing. The Buckshot Speedway was what it was. They attracted a large crowd for what they were offering. Good on them. Their job is to appeal to their local market. From the size of the crowd, maybe 300-400, in both the stands and at their trucks and cars the track is meeting the objective of attracting fans. With that I began to make my move from Clanton, Alabama back home to San Clemente, California. That would be a long slog. During the drive from Atlanta, Georgia to Alabama I gained an hour by changing from the eastern time zone to the central time zone. On the way back to Atlanta tonight I would lose that hour. I arrived at the Georgia welcome center on the state line of Georgia and Alabama at about midnight eastern time. After just three hours of sleep in my hotel last night tonight I would sleep in my car. I don’t sleep in my car to save money. I only sIeep in my car when there is not enough time between the onset of sleeping and my wakeup call to make getting a hotel worthwhile. I was shooting for a 6:30 a.m. flight that would take me from Atlanta back to Los Angeles on Sunday morning. I went to sleep about midnight in the National Car Rental Racing Toyota Camry. I actually woke up after about 2 1/2 hours of sleep in the rest area at 2:30 a.m. I had hoped to take a pee break and then sleep for another 90 minutes. However, the Georgia Welcome Center is actually closed, including the restrooms, from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. Rather than hang around the rest area any longer I headed on over to the Atlanta airport arriving at 3:30 a.m. I was three hours early for my 6:30 a.m. flight! I might point out that Carol does not come on these types of trips. Don’t get me wrong. She DOES comes on some wild trips (above) but sleeping for three hours in a hotel or for 2 ½ hours in a rental car is not really her jam. It isn’t most people’s jam. I don’t even want it to be part of my jam! However, when the plan changes in the middle of the trip all bets are off. SUNDAY At this early hour the TSA pre-check line wasn’t open. That meant I had to travel like “regular people” do. I really don’t like to do very many things like most regular people do. That’s just not good enough for me. As a “regular person” I needed to take my laptop and my iPad out of my travel bag. I need to take off my shoes and take everything out of my pockets. As a nearly decade long user of TSA pre-check, I don’t have to do any of that stuff. Thank goodness for TSA pre-check! Since I was so early, I took the opportunity to get most of my four miles worth of powerwalking out of the way. I have a streak of nearly a full month of walking at least 4 miles each and every day. I did check to see if the Atlanta airport Minute Suites was available. They only have five rooms. It wasn’t. Other travelers had rented these rooms for the night at $179 per. Although I didn’t sleep in my rental car for 2 ½ hours to save money saving money was a by-product of that move. Maybe I’ll take that $179 savings and re-invest it with one of the trips that involves Carol. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Next up was my five-hour flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles. I slept a good deal of the way. I landed at 8 a.m. Los Angeles time. I found that pretty remarkable. What was so remarkable? I could be watching the dirt track races in a small town like Clanton, Alabama at a place called Buckshot Speedway on Saturday night and be on the runway in Los Angeles at 8 a.m. the next day, Sunday morning. I looked around the plane. Had anyone else toured Tuskegee University yesterday? I didn’t think so. This trip hadn’t gone exactly as planned. If it had gone exactly as planned, I never would have seen any racing down in Central Alabama. I would have been watching UCLA play on Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia. What did I learn from this? It wasn’t so much what I learned it was what I was reminded of. Life doesn’t always go as planned. Sometimes that’s because the user fails to work his/her plan or has no real plan. Sometimes it’s because things that happen are totally outside of the control of the user. Sometimes the user wants to believe things were out of his/her control when in reality they simply didn’t have their shit together. For me…I simply want to control what I can control when I can control it and when I can’t control it, I’ll live with the results. Hope you enjoyed the read and we’ll see you next time. Randy Lewis – 85 countries – 2,771 tracks. Alabama The Heart of Dixie State This afternoon I saw racing at my 26th lifetime track in the Heart of Dixie State, yes, the Heart of Dixie State. I hold the #2 trackchasing ranking in Alabama. Alabama ranks #27, amongst all the states, in tracks seen for me in the U.S. Here’s a link to my all-time Alabama state trackchasing list. I have made 19 separate trips to Alabama to see these 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 Alabama sayings: It’s blowin’ up a storm JUST THE FACTS 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 865 tracks of my lifetime total. Why is this noteworthy? Because it’s true. Total Trackchasing Countries My nearest trackchasing competitor, a native of Belgium, has seen racing in more than 30 fewer countries compared to 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 to see the video production from the racing action today. [enter YouTube videos] See it in pictures! Click on the link below for a photo album from today’s trackchasing day. You can view the album slide by slide or click on the “slide show” icon for a self-guided tour of today’s trackchasing adventure. Each trip includes a lot of photos of the “trip” and not just the racing. From one U.S. senator, “I think if I wanted to see what this adventure was like and didn’t have all that much time, I would just look at the photo album.” All photo albums are fully captioned. NCAA basketball; a tour of Tuskegee University…and the Buck Shot Speedway 
