The Test

This weekend’s Peach State Classic at Senoia Raceway is a lot of things. For starters, it’s hefty purse - $10,000-to-win main event on Friday night backed up by a $52,000-to-win feature on Saturday night – will make it the richest short-track race run in Georgia this year.

 It ranks right up there with the biggest short track races of the past in the Peach State. 

 Even though some of the bigger names are running a similar event out West, there still are plenty of headline-grabbers headed to Senoia for the weekend.

 But the Classic also is a big test – for the Pollard family that is promoting the event and is responsible for the logistics that come with an undertaking like that, as well as the all-important task of covering that purse.

 It’s another test for local drivers as they take on big-name counterparts from elsewhere. And it’s a test for the newcomer drivers and teams, who will have to figure out Senoia’s unique, gumbo-like racing surface. 

 But the biggest test likely will be for folks like you and me.

 How we respond to this weekend’s race will go a long way in determining whether our local track will one day be hosting an annual event that rivals the Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Fla.

 If we talk up the race to our friends in the next few days, encouraging them to give Senoia a try, and turn out ourselves, it will make a big statement.

 If we grumble on social media about ticket prices that makes a statement too. I find it ironic to have read complaints on social media about Senoia’s pricing, which is plenty reasonable given the race purse, coming a week after reading no complaints about ticket prices when the Atlanta Braves played in the World Series tickets. A quick check on Google told me that World Series tickets range from $300 to $10,000 a pop, with the average well over $1,000.

 For a while after the Classic was announced, I was worried about the Pollards having a bad weekend and taking a big loss on the event. I even brought up my concerns to Sonny.

 He assured me that he was willing to take the gamble.

 I hope lots of us on the spectator side will take a chance on this weekend’s races too, if not for ourselves but for the future Senoia fans who might want to have a major-league event to close out each season.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Proud Daddy

Image
  In several conversations with Sonny Pollard since he and his family repurchased Senoia Raceway and began transforming it into one of dirt racing’s better facilities, he’s asked me: “Do you think my daddy would be proud?”  And my answer is always: “Yes.”  Hence Pollard died young and has been gone for years, but his influence on Georgia auto racing remains strong, and that’s a big reason he was recently elected as a member of the Class of 2023 of the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame. He joins long-time Atlanta Motor Speedway president Ed Clark, Hall of Fame founder Gordon Pirkle and short-track asphalt racers Bob Leach and Sandy Goss.  On a personal note, it was Hence who helped start my career as a motorsports journalist by giving me a season pass when I was just a teenager. I tried to repay him by sending in results from the track to the old Atlanta radio stations WBIE and WPLO and to the Atlanta newspapers, and that eventually led to a career as a full-time write...
Read more

Things That Make You Say "Wow"

Image
 As I sit here on a rainy night in Georgia, I’m thinking about some things I’ve seen lately that have me saying “Wow!” to myself.  On a personal note, I recently received my red, white and blue Medicare card in the mail. Since I lost my health insurance along with my job at the big newspaper we’ve paid some really hefty premiums for some not-so-great coverage.  We even had some agents look at our medical history and tell us our best hope is to hurry up and turn 65.  I’m here now, and it feels pretty darn good.  On the racing front, I, like a million or more others, am still marveling at the way Ross Chastain rode the wall on the last lap at Martinsville Speedway to pass five drivers for position and claim a playoff berth.  I’ve had several drivers, good ones, tell me they’ve often wondered if that would work. Of course none of them ever tried it, which makes what Ross did even more impressive.  Just today, I saw something else on the racing...
Read more

The Rest Of The Story

Image
    It makes me feel really old to be writing about something that happened 50 years ago, but here goes anyway.  Back in 1973, I went to many a race with a group of men from my hometown of Inman and thereabouts. Most of them are gone now. My distant cousins, Wesley, Weldon and Ronnie Stubbs were regulars in our group, as were Freeman Clemons and Pete Gay.  Cecil Dunn went occasionally, and it’s refreshing that his memory of the things we saw back then matches up with mine. Cecil and I were standing next to the backstretch fence in 1975 when Tiny Lund was killed in a crash just in front of us. We also watched as two Georgia men, watching from the infield across from us, scaled the fence and rescued Terry Link from his burning car, even as a track worker was using his caution flag as a weapon to try to keep the two heroes away from Link’s car, which had impacted Lund’s. (Years later, thanks to a savvy researcher at the newspaper, I was able to interview Richard Sim...
Read more