POSTED MARCH 4, 2025

Opening night at the Mottville Speedway was exciting and successful! The racing in all divisions was very close and Randy Morley and Merle Yoder gave us big thrills with their accident in the middle of the backstretch! The 51^st annual opening night will certainly be remembered for Morley’s flipping his truck end over end into the infield! Wow!

It was our earliest opening night ever! Last season we opened the 3^rd Saturday of March and that was our earlier opening ever up to that point! So we are charting new ground here! In 1995 and 1999 we opened the 3^rd week of March, 96 and 97 the 5^th week of March, 91,92 and 98 the first week of April and in 93-94 and 95 not until the 2^nd week of April due to postponement the first week of April. But each year I made the observation that March weather was sometimes very very good and decided to go for an earlier opener and I could not have been more pleased with our show Saturday night! It was in the 30’s most of the night and not bad at all for March 1! We had 18 stock cars and 7 karts, very comparable to last season when it was two weeks later for the opener.

This is the first season of the last 11 under current management that we had 100% of our track officials back! No turnover at all and that is really, really nice as we have finally assembled a group of officials who work well together!

We have registered 11 cars this season who did not appear on opening night so we can certainly expect higher car counts as each night goes on! Plus I talked briefly to Barry Harrison and he told me he will be seeing me about tires soon as his Mottville Stock is ready except for tires! Wade Owens told me that he and Dick Groves have their street stock almost completed and will be challenging Morley soon! Tom Pearson informed me that Scott Baker has his street stock done and will be bringing it to practice this Thursday and if all goes well will race it next Saturday!

If the 7-10 day weather forecast is not too bad we plan on turning on the water in the pits Thursday prior to practice. As for the front it will be April before we turn the water on as there are too many open areas to try to heat when it gets down to under 25 degrees at night! The pit area is fairly easy to keep warm with space heater and heat bulbs.

Yoder Oil Co, our racing fuel supplier, has advised me that racing fuel will be going up about 20 cents per gallon this week. Last season as gas prices went sky high racing fuel remained at $2.999 per gallon all season long so it was certainly due to raise!

Lots of positive response to our announcement of a mini-thunder car class! These are cars you buy all over for $100-$250 and go racing! MTC will fit in well at Mottville and we plan on racing them as soon as we have 2 or more and I predict it will not take as long to get this class started as it did the regular thunder cars! Very low cost and very stocky! This will be most easy to enforce as any car not meeting the MTC rules will simply be moved up to Mottville Stock! So very soon you will see 5 classes of stock cars plus karts at Mottville every race night! This means most nights we will have 6 dashes, at least 6 heats and at least 6 features. That means at least 18 events and that is more than most tracks have! Plus when we have the Vintage Mods add another 2 heats and a feature!

April 22 we add Sundays to the schedule and I look for Sundays to be much better this season! The earlier starting time will enable people to get home earlier for going to work and school the next day and we now are about the only track in the area racing on Sunday!

If all the drivers come this season who have emailed me we are going to have some big car counts before this season is over! 25 for March 3 is great and we have only 73 more nights left! I again want to make clear to all that we will only cancel a night when it pours down and I mean pours down! Otherwise we will run on a wet track and in light rain and always in the cold! We do not run expensive late models or modifieds so we can open and run on nights when other tracks would cancel!

Finally best wishes to our webmaster David Schaefer on his long awaited surgery this Tuesday! David has been in our prayers for a long time now and hopefully this surgery will give him some long needed relief from the pain!

Hope to see everyone this Saturday night for our 2^nd official night of racing in 2001-our 51^st season!