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Flooding of Lakeside Speedway leaves drivers and fans with few good options on schedule Just a year ago, the sights, sounds, feuds and fender-rubbing racing at Lakeside Speedway were captured in a nationally televised documentary series.
Today, the roaring engines and trash-talking drivers featured on “Heartland Thunder” have been drowned out.
Instead of a Friday night filled with race fans, Lakeside’s three-eighths-of-a-mile dirt track is immersed under as much as 10 feet of water, a victim of Missouri River flooding.
The track in Wyandotte County, which was closed indefinitely last weekend, is not expected to reopen until October — if at all this year. In its current condition, it appears more suitable for boat races or Jet Skis than race cars.
“We missed six of the first 14 Friday nights because of weather,” Lakeside owner Marc Olson said. “Five caused by rain, the last one because of flooding.
“Last year, we lost 13 of 29 to rain. It’s like this black cloud is hanging over Lakeside.”
The closure of Lakeside has left the 2,500 to 3,000 loyal fans who attend the Friday night races without their weekly dose of dirt-track racing. And it has forced 100 or so drivers and race teams to search for other tracks that draw decent crowds and pay enough to make it worthwhile to haul race cars greater distances for smaller paydays.
“I’ve talked about going racing at other tracks on Friday night, but there’s not another track that draws the people that Lakeside draws,” said former champion Tim Karrick of Basehor, one of Lakeside’s most successful and popular drivers. “And it’s hard to drag sponsors who want to sponsor your car to a track two hours away.”
Olson won’t estimate how much money the flood will end up costing him in lost revenue, not to mention repairs, especially if the entire season is washed out. He and his wife, Page, are working the phones and going online trying to obtain disaster-relief loans.
President Barack Obama has declared Leavenworth, Atchison, Doniphan and Wyandotte counties to be disaster areas, but the disaster relief is granted county by county, and Wyandotte has yet to receive funding because not that many businesses have been affected, Page Olson said.
“Our next step is to get hold of Congressman (Kevin) Yoder and start putting some pressure on him, so we can get disaster-relief loans through the SBA and apply for loss-of-use funds, because we have a disaster,” said Page Olson, who referred to herself not only as the track’s co-owner, but its “co-victim.”
The loss-of-use funds, she said, would help “with the bills you’d normally be able to pay and debt you normally would service when you’re racing.”
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This isn’t the first time Lakeside, nestled in a low-lying area 4 miles north of Kansas Speedway off Interstate 435, has been hit by flooding. A photo of the flood of July 1993 in the Lakeside Speedway kitchen area shows water covering the track and grandstands and nearly reaching the roof of the main building.
“In ’93, they called that the 100-year flood,” Marc Olson said. “Here are we are 18 years later. … It’s not as bad as ’93, which we’re very fortunate … but it rained again heavy in Iowa and Nebraska last weekend, so that affects us. …
“They’re calling for the river to be high all summer, which means there’s nowhere for the water to go.”
Technically, the breach of the levee closest to the track —Wolcott No. 1 — has been termed “a spillover” by the Army Corps of Engineers. The dam farthest downstream, Gavins Point in Yankton, S.D., is releasing 160,000 cubic feet of water per second because of the record rainfall from earlier in the year coupled with melting snow, said Josh Marx, natural disaster program manager for the Corps in Kansas City.
“Too much water, too little levee,” Marx said. “And if you get any precipitation on top of that, it will continue. … We feel like we’re going to have water there until the middle of August or well into August.”
Lakeside originated in 1955 at 95th Street and Leavenworth Road and moved to its current site after the 1988 season, when The Woodlands took over the property. The greyhound and horse track was shut in 2008.
Some drivers have wondered whether Olson could move his show to the higher ground of The Woodlands property, but he said the facility was not set up for cars.
During the 1993 flood, when Lakeside was an asphalt track, its races were moved to I-70 Speedway in Odessa, Mo., which now stands empty. But Lakeside converted to dirt in 2000, so there’s no alternative in the metro for dirt racing.
The closest Friday-night track is LA Speedway in Lamont, Mo., near Sedalia. I-35 Speedway, a Saturday-night dirt track in Winston, Mo., is about an hour and a half from Kansas City and could accommodate a Friday-night show, but it’s a smaller facility than Lakeside.
“I-35 is possible,” Marc Olson said, “but … will fans travel that 70 miles? Will the competitors travel? There’s no place closer.”
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Rolls of tickets for races that will not be run are stacked on shelves in Olson’s office. Coca-Cola removed its products from the concession stands on Wednesday. Arctic Glacier, which supplies ice, generously hauled off the frozen food sitting in Lakeside’s concession stand and will store it for free.
“This changes peoples’ lives,” said J.D. Green, who went through the flood of 1993 as a driver and is now president of the Central Auto Racing Boosters, an organization that supports area racing.
“It affects the fans, the concessionaires, the racers, the pit crews, the officials. … But the one thing I have discovered is there is a Lakeside racing community and a racing family within the Kansas City area. Since the flood occurred, I have had calls from drivers, pit crews, fire crews, and fans asking, What can they do?
“Those phone calls emotionally affect me, and I realize how much this track means to our racing community. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything anybody can do until the water recedes.”
The racing had never been better this year at Lakeside — the track that produced NASCAR Sprint Cup star Clint Bowyer of Emporia, Kan., and Nationwide Series driver Jennifer Jo Cobb of Kansas City, Kan. In the first 24 feature races in the six nights of racing, there were 22 winners. A World of Outlaws event packed the facility in June. Metro Sports had come on board to televise the Friday night races live, giving the track even more exposure.
“Lakeside Speedway is the best and biggest in stature of any weekly racetrack within a 200-mile radius because of where it is, the crowds they draw and the star power of the local drivers,” said Kirk Elliott of RacingBoys.com, which covers area race tracks.
The local drivers certainly don’t perform for the money. The winners of feature races pocket about $600, which barely covers their fuel and tire costs.
“I really look forward to summers to race, and I’m not getting any younger,” said Karrick, 48. “People plan their summer around the racing. … It’s like you don’t get to see your racing family. We’re lost. … My wife likes the fact we can go somewhere on Friday night. My youngest daughter is bumming, asking, ‘When’s the water going down? When’s the water going down?’ She’s 13 years old. That’s her life.”
A week ago, Karrick raced another driver’s backup car at a track in Humboldt, Kan. Tom Charles of Bonner Springs competed in an event at Knoxville, Iowa, earlier this week.
“Everybody’s racing plans have changed,” Charles said. “We don’t know who’s going to end up where. … Some guys may take a break and retool everything. Some guys might just take the family and go on vacation.”
Marc Olson said the best-case scenario would be if the track could reopen in time for the Oct. 8-9 NASCAR weekend at Kansas Speedway, when Sprint Cup drivers like Bowyer and Tony Stewart compete with the locals on Friday night, and the Tom Karrick Memorial Race, in honor of Tim Karrick’s father, is held.
“Lakeside will be back,” Olson promised. “When, I don’t know at this time. But it will be back.”
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RUBBIN IS RACIN
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FAQ
Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 1:10 pm 
