from the EDITOR HAMMER HILL MEMORIES

but, man, they can’t close it down.” Well, they can and they did. We all know a place like this in our lives.

By Justin Zoch

IT HAPPENS all the time. A business closes down and everyone rushes to say “No way. How can they do that? I love that place.” Happens every time. One of my favorite joints to watch live music was Lee’s Liquor Lounge in Minneapolis. It was the closest thing we had to a real Honky Tonk in our cold, northern city and it was gritty, comfortable, woodpaneled, stuffed with characters and quirky bartenders and they always hosted the hippest country bands on their way through town like Big Sandy and the Fly Rite Boys and the coolest of the coolDale Watson - who even wrote a song about the place.

This same experience holds true for racetracks and every season we seem to lose a few more. Some are more expected than others, some affect the sport more than others and some personally hurt more than others. This year, several tracks are on the chopping block including Nebraska’s I-80 Speedway and, up until recent news, Pennsylvania’s Grandview Speedway [a late breaking note has the track reopening in 2023]. Another notable dirt oval, Little Rock’s I-30 Speedway, has already run its last race with the Short Track Nationals (STN) in early October and the track already has a buyer, most likely a developer of the valuable land on the city’s west side, which may require rezoning.

I loved I-30 Speedway, just like I loved Lee’s Liquor Lounge, and I loved it for a lot of the same reasons. I started attending the STN around the turn of the century at a time when a lot of the new racetracks, some tied to NASCAR, were like the dirt tracks at Charlotte or Texas Motor Speedway. These were sharp, welllit showplaces that could grow the sport – kind of like a hot new club with great sound and hot new acts.

I-30 Speedway was none of those things. It was a gritty, down-home, backto-basics racetrack that featured a, quite frankly, rundown grandstand and a pit area sprawled around turns one and two and the backstretch with teams pitting anywhere they could find a patch of cleared pines. I don’t know what I was expecting on my first visit to the STN but it wasn’t this. It was everything I never knew I wanted in a racetrack. It was love it at first sight.

legend over the last three decades – Tim Crawley. Talk about authentic. You’d be hard pressed to find a man more befitting of that adjective than the Crawdaddy, who, when he left his home track to go on the road, became a multi-time American Sprint Car Series champion.

We all enjoy a new track with clean bathrooms and a paved parking lot but I’ve always valued authenticity over polish. I-30 Speedway and the Clay family that ran it were always true to their vision for their racetrack and while many longed for upgrades or changes, I-30 Speedway always seemed just perfect to me. The little place they called Hammer Hill always seemed to deliver the goods on the track, which is important, but most my memories of the place revolve around the pit area and the loose, fun atmosphere that most big money events fail to foster. The STN were always high stakes, high dollar affairs but never felt corporate or corrupted. As an occasional interloper looking for good racing in a great environment, I could not have hoped for more.

Of course, all of my opinions and impressions of I-30 Speedway may be completely outdated – as with most places I love, I haven’t been there since at least 2008, if not before. Gone, but not forgotten, thanks to I-30 Speedway for being the most authentic racetrack I’ve ever attended.

When news arrived of its demise, there was shock and concern about how this could happen. Then, of course, the next sentence out of my mouth was, “I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve been there

At the time, fans were welcomed to the track by a man in a white suit coat and cowboy hat named John Parish who called himself “The Mississippi Scoundrel” and was the living embodiment of everything I loved about the place. To be sure, The Scoundrel wasn’t a cynic. He was as authentic as you could get – just like everything around him. As for the racing, the local