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Mortland starting 4th season hosting NS Racing
Posted
at
12:01 am
by Scott Whitmore
As a new addition to Trackside this year, I will occasionally profile personalities from the local racing community. This is the first in the series.
Steve Mortland has no idea where the fourth season of the Northsound Racing Show he hosts on KRKO 1380 AM is headed.
“I’ve always let the race season determine that for me,” Mortland said. “That’s the cool thing about this show — we can always bounce around from track to track, and see what we can come up with.”
The Northsound Racing show has made its home on Thursdays (with replays available on www.northsoundracing.com) on KRKO, the perfect time for local racers to listen in while preparing their cars for the upcoming weekend.
Mortland’s show covers any and all types of racing — including sprints, late-models, dragsters, road racing and quarter-midgets — on dirt or asphalt. Although he started out in the mid-1970s as a fan of drag racing, Mortland said his first visit to Skagit Speedway changed all that.
“I became hooked on oval track racing that night,” he said. “I saw Bobby Burrow do a wheelie all the way down the backstretch during a caution lap.”
Mortland has been talking about racing on the air for the station since 1998, when he was Scott Ellsworth’s pit reporter. He moved up to calling the races himself, and his favorite memory of that happened one Saturday night at Evergreen Speedway in 2003.
It was the weekend before the Northwest Tour was slated to run a 125-lap race on the three-eighths track at Evergreen, and as Mortland said: “The Tour hadn’t run a three-eighths race in about 25 years, so the excitement level was pretty high.”
To get experience on the smaller track, a lot of the tour regulars, including Jason Jefferson, Garret Evans, Ron Eaton and Pete Harding, took part in the speedway’s weekly late-model race. To add to the radio program, Mortland arranged to have local late-model racing stars Kevin Hamlin and Gary Lewis call the race, with him coaching them on a remote mic.
Evergreen regular John Zaretzke battled Jefferson “in an absolute dog fight of a race,” Mortland said, which Zaretzke won. Zaretzke then pulled his car through the pits and parked it on the tarmac in front of the grandstands.
“He got out of the car, went up into the grandstands, where myself and Dave Piland got to him for an interview,” Mortland said. “His comment was how cool it was that the self-proclaimed best late-model driver in the county just got his (tail) handed to him by a local boy. A classic moment.”
In addition to hosting the Northsound Racing Show, Mortland has a full-time job at Action Auto Parts in Lynnwood. Getting to talk to a diverse group of racers, owners and fans has been the best part of hosting the show, he said.
“I've made a lot of friends that I wouldn't have has the opportunity to meet,” he said. “One would be a gentleman by the name of ‘Methanol’ Mel Anthony, an old time midget and sprint car driver who wrote a book called ‘Smoke, Sand and Rubber’ about racing in the Seattle area in the 1940s and 50s.”
Mortland has also had the chance to pay tribute to some local racing icons, including doing memorial shows for announcer Dave Piland and promoter/racer Fred Brownfield. “The response we got from those two shows was very unexpected,” Mortland said, adding “It felt good to know that we touched a few emotions those nights.”
Although longtime Northsound Racing collaborators Carla Heath and Gaylon Stewart have moved on, Mortland will be assisted again this season by producer Sheree Berg and he’ll be joined by Tom Gliterho as co-host.
“The nights when Tom can’t make it, I’m just going to pick up the phone and have someone come in,” Mortland said.
Berg also happens to be his girlfriend, and when the two aren’t at the races or on the air they’re enjoying the sound and picture of a new home theater system. Mortland’s favorite TV show, “Boston Legal,” was recently canceled, but he said “thankfully we have three seasons on (it) on a box set deal, so all is not lost.”
All will not be lost for the local racing community, either, with Steve Mortland and the Northsound Racing Show providing a voice and an on-air home.
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