THE RED
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So I DID go to Thompson Speedway last weekend to see the vintage racecars on the road course there. Turns out, though, that wasn’t even the highlight of the day. There was a car show there, a wicked big car show, in fact THE Wicked Big Car Show. 

What made it big was the small price to take part. Any car – or bike, or seemingly anything on wheels with a motor – could be entered for only 15 bucks. Better yet, admission was free. That meant there were tons of antique cars of every era, plus street-rods, rat rods, sports cars, dragsters, trucks, bikes, a tractor or two, and maybe a rocket-ship. There also were Suburu SUVs like the one my daughter Marcy drives. Why not? The entry fee was less than parking fees most places, although free parking put Marcy’s Subaru almost in the midst of the cars on display, anyway. 

Did get to see some racing from a few spots open to show-attendees. My grandson Wesley took an interest in the formula cars. He's into F1 these days. I always take an interest in formula cars. I’ve always liked cars built for racing without concession to anything else. But still, all those 55 Chevies were sure fun to check out

So I made it to Thompson on June 1 for the vintage motorcycle racing, although the event didn't
exactly bring a ton of significant vintage road-race bikes out of the garages, as I was hoping. Yes,
I saw more than a few of Yamaha's old two-stroke giant-killers from a half-century ago, but otherwise this was a gathering of odd creations.

While most bikes reflected back to seasons past, most would have been out of place even then.
Consider the modern chassis adorned with full, slick bodywork sporting the colors of historic
sponsor Repsol. The bike was powered by an old Honda four-stroke dirtbike motor. They never
were up to the job of cruising through the woods, never mind flying down the front straight on
the Thompson road-course. Still, it was pretty neat.

The ancient Harley equipped with a hand-shift was truer to the word "vintage," its rider sporting
a black-and-yellow bumble-bee T-shirt to match the bike's own livery. As for racing? I'll wait
until the SCCA weekends coming up later in the season for that.

I just checked out this year's road-course schedule at Thompson Motorsports Park. I always like to get over to Thompson a few times each year. It's only miles away, and wandering around the pits and race course is always fun.
    The first two events this season are for vintage racers: bikes May 31 and June 1 and cars June 20 and 21. I'm glad both are happening, because they haven't happened recently, and they're both favorites of this old guy. I plan to be at both.
    I also plan to make both SCCA racing weekends. The Sports Car Club of America will attract some of the best sports-car racers in the country, but I admit it. I'm there to see the cars.
    If only to dream.

I always liked those cars – and those guys. But I haven't seen ‘em race in a few years, so I found
the Pro Fours of New England website. I left it confused. First, I found fancy graphics and their
complete schedule – for 2024. Finally, I found their schedule for this year on the website
RacingCalendar.net only to learn that, save for two shows at Waterford Speedbowl (Yeah, I
know it's "New London/Waterford Speedbowl," but give my two fingers a break.) and a spot at
Thompson Speedway's World Series in October, their whole season would be "up north."
    I guess the Pro Fours still allow teams to run a GM-Spec V-6 motor, the low-buck brainchild of
Dick Dubois. I have no idea if you still can run a "Turn-Two Mod." I always liked those cars,
too. They were the brainchild of Jim Langevin and Joe Harkins, two guys in New Hampshire
whose slick little mods, running 1000cc Suzuki motorcycle mills, made for than enough mod-
action.
    RacingCalendar.net, by the way, is a pretty good website. They had better info as well regarding what's happening this year at Thompson than Thompson does. And yeah, I know. "Thompson Speedway and Motorsports Park."
    I'll let my fingers rest now.

 March is the month the Icebreaker happens at Thompson Speedway. That’s, like, THIS MONTH! Almost. 
    Thompson lists only ten oval-track events in 2025, which has become kind of the norm there. Note that the only NASCAR presence there comes with the Whelen Mods, three times this year. Still, there are more mod races from more mod series than I’ve ever seen on the schedule. 
    The only midgets will be NEMA Lites, evidently, but Supers are there twice with the new New England Supermodified Series.  And although PASS and ACT are listed as co – I dunno – sponsors, or managers, there is but one PASS and no ACT events listed. 
    I’ll be looking at the road racing schedule soon. Thompson, as I’ve talked about more than once, is minutes from my home. I’m there often. Which gets me thinking – again – that somebody (somebody with money) should promote an event or series or something that runs late models on the oval as well as the road course. Wouldn’t that be fun?

So I swore I was done thinking about NASCAR after I’d recently criticized them more than probably any of its fans care about. No, I figured it was time to adjust my focus to the upcoming season of shorttrack racing, which, after all, is my favorite form of the sport.
    I figured 2025-schedules were out by now, so I checked the schedule for my favorite track, my hometown Seekonk Speedway. And found out – guess what! – Seekonk once again is a NASCAR Weekly-Series track.
    I never thought that amounted to much the last time, save for the annual Busch North Series appearance. But I’ll keep my mouth shut about it. I still plan to be there this year, especially for the Supers. I love Supers. And midgets. Did I mention midgets? 
    And neither has anything to do with NASCAR, so I guess I’m okay.
 

I was trying to read through the qualifying procedure for Bowman Gray’s “Cook-Out Clash” (Huh?). And gave up after the first 45 pages.
    Okay, I’m kidding, but why does NASCAR always think they have a better idea than what’s already proven to work. It reminds me of when they decided to have a dirt race. Great! And then they covered a high-banked paved oval (a curious choice) with trucked-in dirt, like for a supercross race. Supercross is not motocross. It pales in comparison.
    Bristol, the track they covered with dirt, would have been a better bet than Bowman Gray for a “Cook-Out Clash” (Huh?).  But on either track, how about just running straight-up heats to qualify for the feature, the way every other stock car racer has to compete?
    And if you have a dirt-track race, have it on a dirt track, with flat, wide corners that make you have to “turn right to go left.”
    I know there are many financial, promotional and other complications with which NASCAR has to contend. I don’t care. Maybe if they just didn’t take themselves so seriously, they could have a little fun.

I would love to get my hands on an old racecar so I could go play at some track hosting a vintage event. Whenever they have a weekend at Thompson Speedway in Connecticut, I’m there to drool over cars that ran in anger back in my younger days. 
    Sometimes the cars come to play on the oval, in modified coupes and old, obsolete Cup cars (Wait, aren’t even today’s Cup cars obsolete?), mostly. Sometimes they’ll be playing on the road course, so I’ll go see formula cars, sports racers, and the likes of road-going Porches, Jaguars and Ferraris that have been converted to race-spec by guys with more money than they know what to do with.
    I, on the other hand, do not have more money than I know what to do with. So the idea of actually getting out there with these guys in anything other than my imagination dwells, unfortunately, only in my imagination.
    I was thinking, though. Every kind of car I’ve mentioned has a following. Heck, every type of event I mentioned inspires drooling hordes to ogle these machines and get in my way when I’m doing it. Many of these droolers have money, and they’ll return here in a year with their own wallets considerably lighter. And they’ll likely have so much money to blow they’ll have custom-made driving gear, just like the big guys.
    But I was thinking, like I said. When I’d go to a race as a kid, say, at Seekonk Speedway, there’d be 20 street stocks for every mod, ten for every pro stock. And almost all of them were old 70s-vintage Chevy Camaros, their owners pretty much just stripping them out and installing the typical safety gear, seat, roll cage and the like, and then going racing. 
    Nobody ever drooled over the things, and these days I don’t imagine anyone doing it, either. There just has to be a few of these old sleds out behind barns, buried under junk in sheds, or tangled up by overgrowth in the woods somewhere. It might be worth it to some folks to just have somebody come in to dig the thing out and take it out of there.
    I’d be happy to do it. 

…and that’s motorcycles, just to be clearer – they didn’t race on ice or on dirt.
    In that “rink” in Massachusetts where I raced, they just ran on the concrete floor, as I recall. At Madison Square Garden, I remember that they actually used Coca Cola syrup, just the sticky syrup without the carburetion – no, that’s carbonation. Same difference, in a way. 

I heard the forecaster on TV say that we’re halfway through winter. We certainly seem to be in the “depths” of it here in the Northeast. I talked about ice racing recently? I’d swear it’s TOO COLD for it, although the ice is likely great.
    That thought made me realize, though, that there can be racing indoors, and I’m not talking again about slot cars. Years ago, I remember at least one motocross series happening in hockey arenas. There was a touring series, in fact. They (whoever “they” were) called it “Arena-Cross.” In Providence, RI’s Civic Center (now “The AMP”) they pulled back the bottom rows of seats, filled the place with dirt, pushed it around some, and voila! An arena-cross track. 
    The series attracted some of the top riders in the country – who, in the midst of winter, didn’t have anything better to do. My brother Ward, then the “performance” partner in a performance motorcycle-shop with me, prepped the bikes for future “Hot Shoe Hall of Fame Icon” Donnie Cantaloupi.
    Bikes also raced at New York’s Madison Square Garden, home of the B-ball Knicks and hockey Rangers. I joined a bus ride from the old Pawtucket Cycles down to Manhattan, where we gasped at the prices of stuff around the Garden (“Two bucks for a milkshake!?”) and then watched guys flat-track around an oval stuffed into the same space as an arena-cross track.
    Don’t know of any of this happening anywhere near here these days. Or even that old hockey rink that held flat-track races where anybody could race. There was no heat at all in that building, wherever it was. That’s almost as bad as ice racing on a lake. 
    Oh well. We’re halfway to our next green flag.