Skagit Speedway’s new owners bring back the Outlaws

By John Sleeper

Herald Writer

ALGER – Going into his first full season as owner at Skagit Speedway, Steve Beitler had his own ideas of what would be a great opening night.

He didn’t expect Saturday night’s wild success.

Opening night, postponed for two weeks because a soggy spring turned the dirt track into a mudslide, was worth the wait. The track was fast, the crowd was around 4,500 to 5,000 and an unheard-of 72 cars raced in three divisions.

“I told the guys we might have between 70 and 75, which would have been a dream come true,” said Beitler, a former driver from Sedro-Woolley who was a rookie of the year with the World of Outlaws. “We couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

Sprint-car fans have been abuzz since the popular Beitler and partner Jim Cress bought the speedway from Jim Burrow last summer. Since the change, Beitler made improvements to the facility – a state-of-the-art lighting system should be in place by Saturday – and made a deal to bring the World of Outlaws back to Skagit for the first time in seven years.

“There’s just been a lot of enthusiasm since we took the racetrack over,” Beitler said. “We got a lot of rookies this year and a lot of people have come back after not supporting the track for a couple years.”

The success of opening night was a reward for track personnel who worked overtime to whip the track into shape, to clean and make repairs to the facility and to train new officials.

“We worked our butts off getting this thing open,” Beitler said. “We were here are 6 o’clock Saturday morning. I was on a power washer for 5 1/2hours, cleaning up the entrance area. There were cars unloading in the pits and we were still hanging the new sign out on the front.”

The efforts showed on several levels, most notably in the on-track action.

The powerful but costly 410 class, which has struggled to get 13 or 14 cars, attracted 20 Saturday. A sluggish economy has made sponsorship money tight, yet the car count of 72 was the highest regular-season total in the track’s history.

“Some of the drivers commented that they didn’t get sponsor money this year,” Beitler said. “But still, if there’s a will, there’s a way. They want to race, even if they have to dig it out of their pocket to do it. And the economy, with the way it is, I think it helps us locally. Families don’t plan the big trips. They don’t do the Disneyland, the Florida trips. They still have money they want to spend. They still need entertainment, so they spend it locally on a weekly basis.”

The spectators saw a great show on a dirt track that workers had to scramble to get in shape. A wet winter and early spring made it impossible for crews to work on it in time to open the season on schedule, April 13. In fact, conditions made the surface so soft that workers had just a week to prepare the track for Saturday’s opener.

Beitler gave the brunt of the credit to Paul Lemley, a veteran of dirt-track preparation. The problem was to find a way to pump the right amount of water up through the dirt. Too much water on the surface creates ruts; too little creates a dusty track.

The fear was that the track would be too dusty. But after sunset, more moisture formed on the track, which made for a near-ideal surface.

“Paul Lemley’s just really, really good at preparing a racetrack,” Beitler said. “And I’ve learned a lot about that over the last 15 years. We talked about it and bounced some ideas off each other. We just did what needed to be done.”

Now, the problem is how to follow it up. Beitler plans a ceremony to introduce the crowd to the new lighting system. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

“This is like preparing for the county fair every weekend,” Beitler said. “There’s so much production that goes into this thing. Everything from ordering trophies to making sure you have a national anthem singer to making sure repairs are done to the track. Is the food right? Are the cooking machines working? Are the toilets unplugged? There’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes that people don’t realize.”