An excellent article by one of my favorite bloggers on WP. It’s interesting to note that I had the same conversation with my good friend Richard Lesiecki about how his son and his son’s friends had no interest in obtaining their drivers licenses. Rich and I are both the same age and both spent time watching supermodifieds go around from behind the lense of a 35mm print film SLR camera. My son, Sheldon, is 18 and didn’t share the same ideas about getting his drivers license as Rich’s boy, but he does have a bit of a disdain for motorsports. Some of that changed when I took him to his first International Classic 200 last year at Oswego Speedway. I think he was excited about the speed and that fact that he knew many of the drivers helped a lot to ease his attitude against something that means so much to his father.
I’ve said many times in my column and while bench racing that we need to attract families to supermodified races. We need to learn how to get new kids excited about our form of racing and motorsports in general. I think much of the problem lies in the fact that most of us our age got caught off guard with societal changes because we were too busy having our own fun listening to big blocks roar around the racetrack. Now it’s all about catching up. I hope we can.
Normally, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to what comes out of NPR. Let’s just say that I don’t fit into their demographics or target audience. But I came across an article from NPR last week that got my attention. It was about the upcoming generation of millennials and their disdain for the automobile. The article focused on how this affected the auto industry, but I got to thinking how it would translate into the future of motorsports.
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Hi, We brought our grand kids to Madera Speedway last year. We stayed for practice and then took them to the hotel. I said I’m not paying $50 to have the kids on their Iphones playing games. So off they went! The Supers are a dying breed of race cars here in the Central Valley. It is so sad. We were San Jose Speedway fans from the Tully Rd. track. We used to have a AB& C main events. That was in the 70’s and early 89’s. Now at Madera Speedway you are very lucky if you have 7 supers.
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I know exactely what you mean. I do feel that many tracks are STILL charging too much to see the supers. The International Classic 200 this year at Oswego Speedway was $55 for general admission. Now granted, that’s a 200 lap granddaddy of all supermodified races with 34 cars starting, and I get that big shows will generally justify having higher purses and thus higher admissions. BUT, $50 for a regular show at Madera is insane even if the supers are sharing the card with midgets and the like.
I have heard many stories about San Jose and have been fortunate enough to visit the old fairgrounds track. We can’t ever go back, that’s for sure. We just have to figure how how to know where we’ve been so that we know where we are going. Keep the faith, as hard as it is, I know we can all get through this slump too.
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