New Egypt Speedway, 12 August 2006 2006 August 13
I finally made it to the track down the street from me this year – New Egypt Speedway. I went to New Egypt and paid $20 to see the URC sprint cars. The URC sprinters usually put on a great show of 360 sprint car racing. This was not the case this time. It was probably the worst URC show I have ever been to. That said, it won’t stop me from watching the touring series again because I usually really enjoy them and I know this was just a fluke. What was not a fluke. unfortunately, was how New Egypt runs the show – not all that well. This is one reason I haven’t been going to New Egypt Speedway. They waste time all night long and the roaming announcer tells inside jokes and talks about his friends and family instead of talking about the racing. I can’t count how many times he was talking about something other then the action on the track when it would have been nice to know who was driving what car and how many qualify, what the rules as far as inverts are, etc. When the announcer was talking about racing, he was talking about NASCAR Nextel Cup racing. If I wanted to hear about that, why the heck would I be at a non-NASCAR sanctioned track when I can watch about 23 hours of NASCAR programming a day on Speed TV?
Anyway, there were some bright spots during the evening. he first was the 15 lap super stock (or whatever they are calling them this year) race went non-stop. It didn’t have the most action ever, but was quite enjoyable. The second was the ending of the dirt modified race. While I was rooting for underdog Sam Martz, Jimmy Horton made a pass in the last turn of Martz for the win. Too bad most of the first 2/3′s of the modified race was caution filled. The Sportsman race was also pretty good.
As I mentioned earlier, I am usually a huge fan of the URC series. However, they decided to take a queue from the modifieds last night and kept on spinning out. There were a lot of cautions and no flow to the race. By the time the URC feature was over, it was getting late with the Sportsmen race still to go. This is when the track finally decided to speed things along. It is amazing they can actually run a good show and not waste so much time when they try. The question is why weren’t they doing this all night? If instead of running needless laps under caution so the announcer can talk about nothing to do with the races, and if the put the cars on the track right away, etc., they ran the show well, they wouldn’t of had to rush at the end.
Oh well, if they ran the races like this all year, I didn’t miss much. I’ll probably go back on Wed. for the DIRT series race, but if something else comes up, I won’t worry about skipping New Egypt and I am certainly not in a hurry to go back for a regular show despite the track being only about 7 miles from home. I just don’t understand why most short tracks don’t try to put on a better show. Over half of the fan left before the end of the URC race, and probably 3/4′s were gone before the Sportsmen race ended. I know some new-comers to the track that sat in front of me weren’t happy with the wasted time and poorly ran show, and I doubt they will be back.
My 2006 race viewing stats after the August 12′th race New Egypt Speedway:
Races: 19
Tracks: 16 (12 new) (149 lifetime)
States: 12 (3 new) (35 + DC lifetime)