New Promoters @ Silver Dollar Speedway

In case you haven't heard the Chico, CA track has a new promotion team of note for next season. World of Outlaws Champ Brad Sweet, brother-in-law Kyle Larsen and area Sprint star Colby Copeland are replacing the retiring Dennis Gage who has run it since 2010 and was previously involved with long time promoter John Padjen for several years. Gage has also run nearby Marysville Raceway for a couple of years but I don't know yet if he is stepping away from that track too.

Sweet will be responsible for day to day operations and Copeland will probably do most of the grunt work with the nationwide schedules that Sweet and Larsen will continue to have. The big races like the annual Gold Cup have fallen on hard times in recent years to where it has been just another WoO show with a mediocre purse from the halycon days when it was a really big deal with a purse to match will, I'm sure, be given much emphasis.

They also say the grassroots divisions ( non Sprint cars) will be given attention. The stock car stuff has had no attention in years and the 25 year old purses of some such as our Super Stocks (called Street Stocks @ Chico) will hopefully get some effort to getting the dwindling car counts back where they used to be.

The $ to turn Silver Dollar around should be there but I hope it's not the old saw of "the way to make a small fortune in racing is to start with a large fortune." We'll see.

I saw that a few days ago. It said Gage was going to still promote Marysville. I hope this deal at Silver Dollar works out. It is an iconic track in Ca. on the level of the infamous Calistoga.

Yep, Bob, he's still going to helm MRP which means hope for the winged super stocks coming back are nil and his focus will still be on innumerable sprint car classes. I'm sure the Hobby stocks will be in good shape though as they regularly get 25-30 of them and are paid a paltry $150 for a win.

The back gate rules though Marysville gets much larger grandstands counts than the regular Silver Dollar shows. A shame for us as it's our closest track and we race very well there.