Why is Pennsboro remembered so fondly?

[Pennsboro23]

Love hearing all of these stories about my hometown track.

[Raceready]

Lol Sometimes after parking off of the gas lease road where you were blocked in for the weekend a person was limited on what they could do when the racing was over. We walked down the road to a bar named Margies for liquid refreshments. A wild place indeed! One of the crew chiefs that shall remain nameless "borrowed" a riding lawn mower from a local residents yard and was using it to shuttle people sitting on the hood and standing on the running boards to and from the track. It worked well until the W.V. State troopers put an end to all of the ATVs on the road. Golf carts weren't very efficient there because of the mud, blood, and the beer. They tended to get stuck in the mud holes and in the various creek crossings. After being there every time the song [Bubba shot the jukebox] would start playing I would say " I've been there" !!

[jlacey]

I was only 14-16 the years my uncle and i went. I was working/driving in the area about a year ago and noticed things started looking kinda familiar. Saw the plant at the bottom of the mountain and almost put the box truck on its side trying to make that turn so fast. Stopped to take pics and everything but so many memories came back just standing there looking at the track. I wanna experience it as an adult now, the way it was back then. Him and I always say out of all the sh1tholes weve been to that 1 is by far our favorite

[slide-skill]

The porta crappers getting torched , but the track was locked down one lane ,!

[jlacey]

I forgot about the annual lighting of the porta crappers

[edavis71]

You're spot on Eric with everything you wrote above, my compadres and I camped out the night before usually up in the sticks in turn one, but the smell was mostly rancid as you said, we always made sure we had plenty of our own food and of course plenty ( and I do mean plenty ) of beverage on hand to get us through the two days and one night. I can remember parking our pickups at a friend's house about three miles away because of the unbelievable traffic jams before and after the race. I've been reading all of these comments and can recall most all of them, and by the way, I only missed one of these races ( 1991 ), the year Fast Freddy won, but I saw it the other day on YouTube and it rekindled a great deal of memories for me. Ya know, seeing future Hall of Famers like RJ, Blackjack, Flintstone Flyer, Moore, Moran, Freddy, Buck, Wearing, and Rodney Franklin ( dam ) I could go on all day with the most famous late model drivers of all time, but these are just a few off the top of my head; and I can recall Bloomer in his first six to eight years here just couldn't get out of his own way if he tried, but wow, something must have kinda tonked him on the head in around '96 because his talent suddenly started to skyrocket into the legend he is today.

I always made sure that no matter where I was in the world whether it was in Shanghai, Rio, Paris, or London, I always made it a strict point to be back in West Virginia by the third week in October. I've read on here about the racing not being that great, but I didn't give a "sh*t", I was in Pennsboro and I was watching the greatest late model drivers to EVER live.

And yes PennDirt, I stick to my original thought, this place was without question the " Woodstock " for any diehard late model racing fanatic, no matter how putrid some things were, the magical Pennsboro always brought me back to America on that wild and wacked out weekend in October.

Excellent post my friend!!!

[weatherman85]

What killed the track? Pretty sad. It seemed like a huge event.

I 2nd this question. Sounds like the track didn't have any trouble pulling in the cars or crowds of people so why did it shut down? Development in the area? Bad Promoting? Silly politics?

[raburke23]

I 2nd this question. Sounds like the track didn't have any trouble pulling in the cars or crowds of people so why did it shut down? Development in the area? Bad Promoting? Silly politics?

Track was run by the fair board and since they didnt have weekly racing, the fair board politics made it impossible for Carl Short to come to any further leasing agreements. The place had long outlived its life. Everyone will tell you it was a sh!thole, but they loved it...well, it was a sh!thole and was declining. The lack of lights and increase in dust made it a safety issue. I went a handful of times and would never ever go back. Ive got enough nostalgia in my head. I want the opportunity to see good racing and you just wouldnt see it at the Boro. I once saw a 24 car pile up in a street stock feature on the front stretch. The dust was so bad, the 2 leaders spun off four and the whole field piled in at full speed, completely unable to see. The scheduling was so bad. They ran a support class for some dumb reason and had no time limit. If you had never been, consider yourself lucky.

[Raceready]

I 2nd this question. Sounds like the track didn't have any trouble pulling in the cars or crowds of people so why did it shut down? Development in the area? Bad Promoting? Silly politics?

I believe that it may have had something to do with the local water company. They had some sort of spring house below the third turn. Another thing I now recall is that during the last year or so a couple of officials from the W.V. Tax department were harassing the crews about them selling t-shirts out of the back of their haulers. We took ours down until they left and then moved them to just inside the ramp so that fans could still see and purchase them.

[Pennsboro23]

I 2nd this question. Sounds like the track didn't have any trouble pulling in the cars or crowds of people so why did it shut down? Development in the area? Bad Promoting? Silly politics?

Flood, they eventually ran again but had a poor promoter. By that time Carl Short had already taken his two races elsewhere.

[Cleetus Motorsports]

As someone who watched a lot of races from Pennsboro on video, it was pretty awesome to see a proverbial whose who of late model racing there year in and year out. I had a few questions that I hope someone on this post could answer. From looking at google earth, it doesn't appear there would be a lot of parking for spectators. There is a big field off turn 1, but in the videos I have it looks to be filled with campers. Did people park all along route 50? I know someone in an earlier post mentioned the state troopers ticketed people who parked along side route 50 the one year. How did the haulers exit the track? On one of my videos as victory land is going on you can see haulers going down the front stretch towards turn 3, so I am assuming there was an access road off the back stretch? Was anyone allowed to camp in the field that sat behind turns 3 and 4? That is an interesting tidbit about the tax people at the track. I believe that was from the whole Carl Short and Rick and Don Gross mess. Did they tell you why you couldn't sell shirts out of your trailer?

[CIRF]

Longing for Pennsboro and waxing nostalgic is like longing to once again take a dip in a pig $hit lagoon after accidentally falling into one when you were a kid. It was disgusting then and it'd be disgusting now.

[Pennsboro23]

As someone who watched a lot of races from Pennsboro on video, it was pretty awesome to see a proverbial whose who of late model racing there year in and year out. I had a few questions that I hope someone on this post could answer. From looking at google earth, it doesn't appear there would be a lot of parking for spectators. There is a big field off turn 1, but in the videos I have it looks to be filled with campers. Did people park all along route 50? I know someone in an earlier post mentioned the state troopers ticketed people who parked along side route 50 the one year. How did the haulers exit the track? On one of my videos as victory land is going on you can see haulers going down the front stretch towards turn 3, so I am assuming there was an access road off the back stretch? Was anyone allowed to camp in the field that sat behind turns 3 and 4? That is an interesting tidbit about the tax people at the track. I believe that was from the whole Carl Short and Rick and Don Gross mess. Did they tell you why you couldn't sell shirts out of your trailer?

There's not much behind turn 3-4. A water plant and at one race, I can remember them parking some haulers down there but that's about it. Haulers only ever exited out of turn 1. There wasn't much room for parking, mostly parked on the two lane rd near the track. Campers parked in the lot behind turns 1-2 and up the holler behind 1.

I tried attaching an aerial view of the track at this past weekend's bash at the speedway but it's not uploading.

[Raceready]

There was an oil or gas lease road that went way up into the woods up a big hill .Lucky that I always brought a 4WD with me so I would set up camp up there. Once you were in there you may not get out until Monday because by the time they started racing everybody would block everyone else in to where ya just had to wait it out or we had the log skidder pull cars out of the way before. With the way the cars were pulled into the trees and bushes it reminded me of The Children of the Rainbow gatherings that they have when about 20,000 hippies meet every year in the national forests every year. Except I think the hippies were more organized ! After one was there once you figured out that if you have a 4 wheel drive it might be a good idea to bring it. I recall 1 year when old Black Jack Boggs ran into a mud hole to sling the car full of mud to make and he got stuck tighter than a drum and had to be towed on out !

[DennisErbFan]

Aren't there some people trying to fix it up and open it?