Mapes Family Farm – Stockton, Illinois – Lifetime track #2,870
Ozarks International Raceway – Gravois Mills, Missouri – Lifetime track #2,871
I’m not sure this Trackchaser Report is going to be all that compelling for the reader. This is just a simple, quick trip out to the Midwest.
Going into this trip. I have seen racing at 2,869 different tracks. This weekend I expect to add two more. I was thinking about exactly what the number “2,869” really means as regards my trackchasing.
If I averaged seeing two tracks every week then it would have taken me about 1,435 weeks to reach the number I’m at right now.
Can you guess how many years 1,435 weeks is? It’s 27.6 years! That means if I saw two tracks every week for 27.6 years I would have seen racing at the same number of tracks that I have right now, 2,869. I never thought of it that way before. That comparison scares me just a little bit!
I was making this trip because I am a “counting” trackchaser. Trackchasing is a counting hobby. The more tracks you have seen the better. Trackchasers won’t go very far out of their way to see racing at any kind of a racetrack if it doesn’t “count”. If somebody tells you that’s not true I think they are telling you a “story” as we used to say when I was a kid.
I’m going to try to minimize the time it takes to make this trip and minimize the expense. Here’s my plan.
On Friday night I would catch a plane from Los Angeles to Kansas City. I would rent a car for two days. I expected to drive about 900 miles before I caught a plane on Sunday night back to Los Angeles from Kansas City. Short and sweet. Forty-eight hours on the ground roughly in the Midwest and then back to sunny California.
I need good weather to do one of these trips. There was only one positive about this weekend’s weather. It was expected to be dry. Yesterday, the temperatures in Illinois were in the 70s. On Saturday afternoon the expected temperature in Stockton, Illinois, my race location, was going to be in the low 40s with a 15-mile-an-hour wind. That’s not great weather for walking around outdoors for hours.
I was most surprised when I landed at the Kansas City, Missouri airport. I hadn’t been there for a year or two. I will tell you that I think the Kansas City airport had one of the worst terminal setups of any airport in the United States. That’s been the case for 50 years.
I had forgotten they were building a new terminal. When I landed, I was able to experience their new setup. The new terminal opened just six weeks ago on February 28, 2023. It was still a heck of a long walk from where my plane landed to where I could get a bus ride to the rental car center. Nevertheless, the new terminal is a dramatic improvement. I might also mention that airports are absolutely jam-packed and have been pretty much since Covid vaccines came into being.
Kansas City (MCI) is one of those airports where their rental car center is located offsite by a couple of miles. I prefer the rental car location to be walkable. MCI was one of the first airports to have this kind of centralized rental car building. A bus takes you to one building. All of the major rental car brands are located inside that building. I’ve even slept overnight in the rental car center at MCI for a couple of nights.
Just recently I lost my corporate rental car sponsorship. I had that for 20 years. With that sponsorship, I was able to get quality full-sized rental cars in today’s dollars for about $50 a day. Now that I don’t have that rate with National Car Rental, prices are commonly well over $100 a day.
A buddy of mine, Alex A., turned me onto an alternative. I have now used autoslash.com a couple of times. I’ve been able to get rates of $50 or less per day for my rental cars. Thank you, Alex!
When I landed I was using Autoslash to rent from Hertz. I am a member of the Hertz #1 Club with a gold-level status. This means I don’t have to stand in line when I arrive. I can go out and pick any car from the lot just like I used to do with National.
When I entered the Hertz Rental Car car pick-up area tonight, I saw my name on a video board as being upgraded to its “Presidential Circle” status. That’s one level above gold. Nice.
I searched for my preferred rental car, the Toyota Camry. I couldn’t find one. I ended up with a Nissan Ultima. The Ultima in many ways is similar to the Camry but it doesn’t get the fuel mileage the Camry gets.
I hadn’t had dinner so I made a drive-through stop at McDonald’s. Every time I shop at McDonald’s I use their app to create even more savings. Tonight, the app told me that if I spent a minimum of two dollars, Mickey D would give me a 20% discount. Here’s a little secret about that deal. I was more than willing to spend at least two dollars at McDonald’s even if they had given me a 20% discount!
It was going to be a seven-hour drive from Kansas City to Saturday afternoon’s racing in Stockton, Illinois. Tonight, I would knock off three of those seven hours. That would get me to Des Moines, Iowa.
I’m a big fan of Love’s Truck Stops. I’ve even taken showers there. Have you ever taken a shower at a highway truck stop? No? What are you waiting for? I always shop for postcards to give to Carol at Love’s. Rather than stop at an interstate rest area I prefer stopping at Love’s.
Once I knew I was getting on the plane in Los Angeles I immediately went to my Priceline app. I selected a highly-rated Hampton Inn in Des Moines. I got the room for $110 including all taxes and fees. This was $30-$40 cheaper than the very best rate on the Hampton Inn by Hilton website.
As you can see, I use a lot of technology to generate savings. I saved well over $100 on my rental car. I saved 20% on my dinner. Then I saved another $30-40 on my hotel room. I didn’t buy anything cheap. O.K., McDonald’s is inexpensive but I just like being served quickly and I truly do like the taste of a McDouble.
I only bought good stuff cheap. I have done this nearly every day of my adult life. I have tried to buy good stuff cheap. When you save thirty bucks here and $100 there nearly every day it won’t take all that long to generate some pretty hefty savings. Then when you take that money and earn solid rates of return in an S&P 500 index mutual fund you very well will have the resources to go trackchasing all over the world. Oops. I just realized I have spilled my secrets to my fellow competitors!
SATURDAY
Today I will drive four hours from Des Moines to Stockton, Illinois. The one and only race I wanted to see was expected to begin at 4:30 p.m. After the race, the plan was to drive somewhere between five and seven hours. That would get me down towards Gravois Mills, Missouri. Gravois Mills was where tomorrow’s racing was to be held. The closer I can get to the road racing scheduled for Sunday on Saturday night the less driving I would have to do on Sunday morning.
I left my hotel room just in time to catch the last 10 minutes of the hotel’s complimentary hot breakfast. I selected a premade egg omelet and a couple of ounces of sausage to adhere to my 28-day Nutrisystem eating plan. That plan ends in about ten days. At that point, I’ll probably go back to eating the items that create the need for a 28-day Nutrisystem eating plan!
I do my very best to never leave anything in the hotel room by mistake when I leave. I am pretty good at that. I have made some major mistakes like leaving my computer in a hotel room once. It was a stroke of luck that our son, Jim, who was living in Hawaii at the time, was able to drive by the hotel, pick up the computer and get it to me at the airport before my flight departed. Yep. That was a lucky one.
Today I checked my room a couple of times to make sure I had everything and headed for breakfast. I was just down the hallway and noticed that I was missing something. I was missing something very important to me. My glasses. How does someone not remember their glasses? Yes, that’s me WITH my glasses racing out in the California desert.
I went back to the room and spent about 10 minutes searching. No glasses. How does someone lose their glasses in a hotel room when they haven’t left the hotel room? That question stumped me. Don’t even ask me if I searched where you might be thinking my glasses were. I did!
I frantically went through my computer case which carries my MacBook Pro and my iPad and a bunch of cords and a bunch of a lot of other things. No glasses. I was getting frustrated as you might imagine.
Then I thought to check my rolling carry-on case. Eureka! My glasses had been thrown into that case with a handful of clothing and toiletries. That had never happened before in more than 5,000 nights of hotel stays. What did I think at that point? Maybe I am losing it.
I grew up in the Midwest. I can make derogatory comments about the weather in the Midwest because of my heritage.
It’s late April. Virtually all my four-hour drive up to Stockton, Illinois was done in temperatures in the high 30° range. Come on man. When I drove up to Los Angeles yesterday it was 91°!
With the directions provided by the Iowa ATV Hare Scramble Series (IATVHSS) Facebook page, it was easy to find the Mapes Family Farm in Stockton, Illinois. On the drive up, there were some very questionable weather conditions that included rain, sleet, and snow. Just 25 miles from the track the conditions were treacherous. Despite the weather, I was confident the race would go forward. Why so confident? The IATVHSS group mentioned that next week the Mapes Family would be doing their spring crop planting. If they didn’t race there this weekend that was it until next year.
I arrived and paid my $15 admission fee. I was in time to watch a couple of hours of the ATV racing. It looked like they probably had 50 or more competitors in this event. They all came back pretty muddy!
It is always with some trepidation that I attend these UTV woods racing shows. Why is that? If the starting procedure isn’t up to snuff as regards the trackchasing rules I could make a very long trip and end up, not being able to count the track.
In the hobby of trackchasing timed events like road rallies don’t count at all. The procedure that’s in place right now is that all UTVs in a single class must start the race at exactly the same time with one green flag. This is a Randy Lewis Rule.
What is a Randy Lewis Rule? There are several of these by the way. To explain things in as few words as possible these are simply rules that were conjured up by the Dreaded East Coast Trackchasers. The DECTs were, and still are, jealous of my achievements in trackchasing. I came into their hobby years after they started trackchasing. Then, my results blew them away. Some have never gotten over it.
Years ago, they saw me beginning to count off-road racing in Nevada and California, and Arizona. They knew that I could see tens of racetracks out there and they would be shut out. That wasn’t going to work for these folks. They immediately passed a rule that effectively ended all desert off-road racing.
Desert off-road racing often has as many as 200 competitors and sometimes more. However, in desert off-road racing there isn’t enough room for ten or twenty or one hundred competitors to start the race at the same time as they did at Darlington back in 1950. With desert off-road racing they usually start two or three competitors at once. Then every 15-30 seconds or so another two or three competitors follow until everybody is out on the course racing. At events like this, it is the competitor with the lowest elapsed time who turns out to be the winner.
Despite the Dreaded East Coast Trackchasers, trying to stop me from adding this type of racing (Off-road UTVs) to my trackchasing résumé, I have come to see far more UTV races than anyone else. I’m not sure how many I’ve seen but I think the total is well over one hundred.
To this day desert off-road racing and rally racing (above) are not allowed in trackchasing. Can you imagine trying to tell fans of the desert or worldwide rally racing that they are not really seeing racing on a track? Yes, it is preposterous.
In Stockton, they had a good field of UTVs, about 25 or maybe a little bit more. The open class started 13 racers wide in one row all at the same time. The SXS A and SXS B classes started about five and a dozen or so, respectively.
It is common with UTV racing for the starting line to be only six or seven racers wide. There can be a problem when car counts are too large. Yes, a UTV (above) is called a “car”. It’s very possible that a promoter might decide to start a single class in multiple rows at intervals of 30 seconds or so. If that were to happen for every class in a single day, I wouldn’t be able to count the track.
I might fly and drive 10-20 hours, get to the venue, and not know until the green flag drops whether or not I’m going to be able to count the track. I guess it goes without saying that I don’t spend the time and money to go to these events, to not count the track. Trackchasing is a counting hobby, remember?
The weather was definitely an issue. Although it was sunny to some degree temperatures were in the low 40s with a wind of about 15-20 mph. I was well clothed for the conditions but this still was no San Clemente sunny beach day.
When my racing was finished, it was now time to head down for a six-hour drive to Jefferson City, Missouri. I wouldn’t be a trackchaser if I didn’t love long-distance driving. My Hertz Rental Car racing Nissan Altima performed well although it’s much more of a gas guzzler than the Toyota Camry.
Gas prices were much lower in Missouri than in Illinois. I paid just $3.14/gallon in Missouri. It is still common in California for gas prices to be above five bucks a gallon. Since I have an electric car I don’t pay those prices but lots of people do.
As I drove through the Quad Cities, I stopped at my favorite Hungry Hobo restaurant. I picked up a #6 six sandwich and had them cut it in half. That dinner tonight will be dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow.
I always have to ask my HH server what happened to the #4 sandwich. The menu board lists the sandwiches in numerical order from one to eleven but there is no #4. Tonight, when I asked the server she succinctly told me “We don’t have a #4”. That was certainly true. This didn’t answer the “why” of my question. Then she told me that #4 must have been discontinued and not replaced. That was good enough for me. I grabbed a super large Diet Mountain Dew, one of my favorite Hungry Hobo items, and headed on down the road.
Hungry Hobo restaurants, dominate in the Quad Cities in Illinois, and Iowa. You know the Quad Cities, right? The QC, not to be mistaken with the OC, is made up of four cities as you might imagine. These include Moline, East Moline, Rock Island, and…and…? Bettendorf, Iowa. And now you know the rest of that story.
Along the way, I selected a Travel Lodge by Wyndham in Jeff City. Using the Priceline app, I was able to get a reasonable price. I knew I wouldn’t be in the room that long so staying there would be just fine.
I pulled into the hotel parking lot at nearly midnight. I encountered a desk clerk who seemed to be having a lot of her own personal problems. Apparently, the coworker following her shift hadn’t shown up yet. She was having a hard time getting an Uber ride to wherever she wanted to go. I tried to empathize, but I had my own issues. I had driven nine hours today. I had stood out in cold weather for another two or three hours. I wasn’t being paid by the Travelodge to be nice to the guests.
The hotel didn’t have an elevator. I marched up to the second floor carrying more than 50 pounds of luggage to find my room. The key my stellar clerk gave me didn’t work. Now it was back down to the front desk. The clerk wasn’t very apologetic regarding her mistake. If I had to guess I don’t think she will ever be the president of the Travelodge chain. There’s a reason that some people are in meaningless jobs and this clerk’s behavior is one of those reasons.
SUNDAY.
Today I would be visiting another road course track but it would be much different than yesterday’s dirt road course at an Illinois farm. The racing on this Sunday afternoon would be on a “traditional” permanent asphalt road course configuration. The agenda for today called for a trip to the Ozarks International Raceway in Gravois Hills, Missouri. This track opened just a year ago or so. It has been seen by very few trackchasers.
The Ozarks International Raceway was about an hour from Jefferson City which is the capital of Missouri. It is definitely a video game-type driving experience to navigate the two-lane roads of the Ozarks. If I had had more time, I would have stopped in at Branson, Missouri for their entertainment. I’ve been down there several times. Carol loves the place and I do too.
When I pulled into the entrance of the Ozarks International Raceway a woman who looked like she might have lived in the Ozarks all of her life greeted me. She asked me what I was up to. The tone of her question worried me just a bit. She almost made it sound like the track wasn’t admitting spectators to this ChampCar Endurance Series race. I told her I had come to spectate at the track. This seemed to satisfy her questioning. For 10 bucks I was given a wristband and admitted to the track.
Today the ChampCar Endurance was having the “Lake of the Ozarks Grand Prix”. For the second consecutive day, the racing would have the same format. Yesterday they had an eight-hour endurance race. They would have another eight-hour endurance race today.
A couple of months ago I went to a brand new road course in Casa Grande, Arizona called the Podium Club @ the Atessa. The Ozarks track is much further ahead of where the new track is in Arizona. OIR has several beautiful multi-story buildings on its property. Everything looks to be top-notch. The place is essentially out in the middle of nowhere. When I see operations like this I always wonder how they paid for it!
The facility also had a really nice garage area for the competitors. The place was huge. Only the cars that were not on the track were inside the garage when I visited. Yes, these folks had done a very good job of building out their project.
Spectator viewing is not great at this venue. Spectator viewing is not great at most recent tracks. Nevertheless, I roamed around to my heart’s content. I saw everything up close and personal as was humanly possible.
I did talk to a crew member from one race team that was headquartered in Mooresville, North Carolina. They had driven up all the way to Central Missouri to race their Corvette. Were they crazy? There is no prize money in the ChampCar Endurance Series. I guess they were about as crazy as a race fan who had come all the way from California to see the racing today. Their Corvette looked like it had been used and abused just a bit since it rolled off the assembly line.
The Ozarks International Raceway was lifetime track #2,871 for me. Afterward, I headed out on the nearly three-hour drive to the Kansas City airport. If all went well (it did), I would be on a 3 1/2[-hour flight tonight from Kansas City to Los Angeles. I might even get back to our modest seaside cottage by midnight. I did, barely.
I did find something most interesting in the Kansas City airport. There was a store called &GO Sporting KC. I have no idea where that name came from. This was a store with no employees. I’ve been in a couple of these in the past. To get into the store you use your credit card. The gate opens and you select whatever you would like to purchase. The store sells snacks, drinks, and the like. When you are finished you scan the items and walk out the door. That’s it! People ask me how the store prevents theft with no employees anywhere in sight. I don’t know the answer to that question.
This had been a good quick efficient trip. In my 48 hours of having the rental car, I drove 1,004 miles. I stayed in a couple of hotels. I tried to eat as well as I possibly could since I am in the middle of a 28-day Nutrisystem eating plan. That does take a little bit of the fun out of one of these trips. Eating, for me, is a big part of trackchasing!
This was my ninth trackchasing trip of 2023. We’re only in the third week of April. I try to stay active! I’m going to be extremely busy over the next six weeks so I hope you have the time to keep up with my travels and adventures.
All the very best.
Randy Lewis
Resting up for next weekend’s adventure