After defending his amateur and overall SuperFans championship with a personal-best 269 races at 89 tracks in 14 states, Wisconsin’s Bob Schafer says, “The pain was not at the ticket booth but at the gas pump.”
He drove his trusty Honda Civic some 62,000 miles and spent $5,277 on fuel compared to $2,844 for tickets. He hasn’t attended fewer than 200 races since ’01, when he saw “only 199 races.” He has averaged 258 races for the last four seasons.
Bob says, “The crowds continue to dwindle and the shows continue to get longer, with more buying pit passes at many tracks than buy tickets to watch.”
Schafer praises Seymour (Wis.) Speedway for shows of reasonable length and entertaining racing. He rated the WoO sprints at Charter Raceway Park the best of the season. Bob also liked the I-10 Speedway in Blyth, Calif., where he enjoyed a November show and found almost everyone there knew all the other fans. He was less pleased with the Slinger Nationals, where the visiting Nextel Cup stars were all in the pits by halfway.
Ed Esser, also from Wisconsin, claimed the SuperFans title for many years before Schafer came along, but now concentrates on “new” tracks and got to 105 for the first time in ’07. An 84,082-mile, 31-state tour yielded 154 races and put his ’98 Blazer over the 490,000-mile mark, but the Chili Bowl was still number one.
Other “winners” included shows at the Lucas Oil Speedway in Missouri and Wisconsin’s Tri-Oval Speedway, a November LM race at Kentucky’s Bluegrass Speedway, the All-Star sprints at Waynesfield, Ohio, and the DIRT modifieds at Virginia Motor Speedway. Ed says his “pet peeves” are still poor announcing and poor visibility. The low point of ’07 was the fire at Abilene, Texas, that took the life of limited modified racer Ryan Bard.
On the stat side, he spent $2,038 to get in, with tickets ranging from $5 to $46 for the Chili Bowl, saw Jerry Coons, Jr. win nine times and saw four drivers — Bubba Altig, Shannon Babb, Collin Demuth and Mark Leuken — win from 13th, the furthest back he saw winners come from all year.
New Yorker Bill Hull, who also found mid-week shows to be much more rare in ’07, was the first “non-Badger” with 147 races at 31 tracks in but six states. He says the two best were at Utica-Rome, one a Patriot sprint-car win by Chuck Hebing and the other twin modified victories by Pat Ward.
Hull’s complaints included his belief that Brett Hearn twice got away with having too many men over the pit wall at Syracuse while others were penalized, saying “this year I will skip DIRT shows if another option is available, with the exception of Lebanon Valley, my home track.”
Gas prices cost Iowa City’s Bob Litton some races but he still went to 135, good for fourth place. He hit 44 tracks in 11 states, spending $1,623.50 for tickets, and his favorite show was a November “special” at Cleveland, Tenn.
Tennessee’s Bob Clevinger caught 120 races at 37 speedways in 10 states despite “getting old,” and he offered some advice to potential SuperFans as he penned his entry in Rome, Italy. “Travel with the wife in the off-season, as a happy wife means a happy race season for me.”
Bob also opines that early season racing is the best, “because everyone has new equipment and is on their A-game.”
He rates the Chili Bowl as his No. 1 event, but also lauds a Rick Auckland win at East Bay, where he went around Josh Richards, Dan Schlieper and Earl Pierson to get the lead, and Steve Aspin’s five consecutive wins at Volusia County.
We’ll continue the rundown of the amateur feature finish next time, as the nation’s premier race fans have a wealth of opinion to share with the promoters of America.