Hickory Speedway

[ron.brown11]

I got bored, so I watched the races from Hickory last Sat night 8-24-24. They ran 5 classes of cars, and here's the breakdown for each: Their top division is late models, and they had 8 on the property. The limited late models were the car count class of the night with 15. The street stocks had 5. The vintage late models had 10. The truck series had a whooping 3.

The late models ran twin 40 lap mains. After about 6 laps, the field was pretty spread out in both races. The only difference between the first & second race, was a 6 car invert in the second race. Tristen McKee won the first, leading every lap. He started 6th, and passed 5 cars for the win in the second. It's not much fun watching only 8 cars, running for 40 laps, twice in 1 night.

The limiteds ran for 30 laps, with the pole sitter leading every lap, and not a lot of passing for the other 14 cars.

The vintage late models were at times scary. There was so much speed difference between some of those car, that I was certain somebody was going to misjudge the closing rate, and drive through someone. That happened twice, once by the leader. But their fast qualifier chose to start at the tail with a bonus if he won the 25 lap feature. By the time he got to second, he was a little over a half a lap behind with 6 laps to go. He nearly did it too. Had a lapped car not held him up, I think he would have. That was the race of the night.

The street stocks up next for 25 laps. It looked a lot more like a test session, than a race, with just 5 cars out there.

It was bad enough that the trucks could only manage 3 for the night. But watching 3 trucks racing for 35 laps, now that's torture.  

There was 1 camera shot that showed the grandstands. I doubt that there were 600 people in them, and that was during one of the late model mains. I think the reason for this, has a lot to do with what I wrote above. No car counts, and too many laps for such small car counts. And this is not just 1 bad night, as this is the norm. They will have the Bobby Issac classic in a couple of weeks. Last year's version got about 3000 fans. The only other night that brings in more cars & fans, is the CARS Tour weekend. The last night of the season there, will happen in 3 weeks. They might fill all seats on Championship night, because they are giving away all seats for that one. For the Issac Memorial last year, the seats were maybe half full, and I don't remember them having 20 cars there to compete. Hickory may have the name "The Most Famous Short Track in America", but it sure doesn't have good racing, or good car counts.  I'm not sure how they keep their doors open. That's not a good look, and having a Kia Soul for their pace car isn't helping.