Tropical Storm Hanna made the infield at French Grimes’s Fork Mountain Raceway look as if Grimes had installed a fishing pond.
But racing went on as the three-eighths-mile clay oval hosted the Racesaver Series 305 Nationals a few short miles from Martinsville Speedway.
All of it is Grimes’s creation — the Raceway, the Racesaver Series, the Virginia Sprint Series.
Basett, Va., is famous for furniture, but it surely seems like the town’s two manufacturers don’t make nearly as many chairs in the Virginia hills as they used to.

What can you do about acts of God and such?
“God didn’t tell them not to make the haul.”

So, Grimes has set about the business of making speed, through downgraded hurricanes and darkest night and all that other stuff.
“French has done such a great job with this place,” said Billy Norfleet, winner of Saturday’s Racesaver Series 305 Nationals.
But Grimes, who still drives with the Virginia Sprint Series when not running events at Fork Mountain, is hoping for more than this.
The storm that sloshed through Virginia and the rest of the mid-Atlantic region Friday and Saturday, hampered turnout for Saturday’s event. The field of sprint cars was about half of what Grimes wanted and anticipated.
What can you do about acts of God and such?
“God didn’t tell them not to make the haul,” said Grimes.
The fact that there could be racing at all at the track is a testament to the acts of French, whose friend and fellow VSS competitor Satch Worley helped re-grade Fork Mountain Raceway, which is still a work in progress nestled off of Highway 220 on the way to Roanoke and accessible by a winding, pitching road that would make one hell of a sports-car course if Grimes and the state of Virginia were in such a mood as to make it one.
“The track was really out of shape when French bought it,” Worley said. “We’re in the grading business, so French called me up and we went to work on it.”
Together, they have worked the track into shape good enough to survive Friday’s torrential rains and still be able provide a fine racing surface for Saturday.
And while Worley was working on the track, Grimes talked Worley out of a semi-retirement from racing brought on by a family illness.
So, Worley, driving Grimes’s second car, is back in the game, just like Fork Mountain has come back to life for a few Saturday nights this year.
And next year, a few more.
Like many small tracks of its ilk around the country, the car counts and the crowds need to increase for the place to flourish.
Not every track is Eldora or Knoxville, even if that’s what they aspire to be.
But not every weekend brings with it a tropical storm either.