This message was edited on
May 06, 2013 at
04:26:02 PM by Speedkills
It really is too bad. There was a real history at this track and its a nice facility. I saw a lot of Outlaw shows there over the years and several times the whole country saw them due to National TV broadcast of them. I know alot of people complained about the shortening of the track but in the end that wasn't the death of the place. The Schatz's gave it a good effort and I thought did a good job on many fronts, last years season saw alot of complaining about the track condition changing alot from night to night. At the end of the day the death of this track was the fact the fair board decided they'd rather take no money rather than guaranteed money cause they were afraid that someone may just make it work and make a dollar and it would all go to them. I'm pretty sure Danny got sick of the complaints from people as well, in that business no matter what you do someones gonna take issue with something and they will let you know and I don't think Danny Schatz has the personality to take criticism very well and I know he can be pretty headstrong. I will say though a couple years prior after the races the track official DQ'd a car for not scaling for like 5th place cause the guy actually ran 6th but then someone else DQ'd and so he bumped up to 5th and should have scaled but didn't know it, so they DQ'd him too, and afterwords in the bar under the grand stand someone told Danny what happened and he pulled his check book out and wrote the kid a check for 5th place right there, I thought it was a pretty stand up thing to do.
I wish the Schatz's would have been able to keep doing it for a few more years cause I think what we were on the verge of seeing was little to no emphasis on the weekly shows and instead switch to putting on a handful of bigger traveling series shows a year, it wouldn't have surprised me if they would have got it going and ran a big money show in July for the Outlaws, but we'll never know now. Last years Outlaw race there was great and it reminded me of years past when the grandstand had a ton of people in it. I think there was plenty of head butting though with the fair board, who at there own admission couldn't make money running it and were gonna be damned if they would watch someone else run it and possibly make some money. Like so many situations, the Fair Board just can't leave people alone to run the show the way they want and make money at it. They also weren't at all accommodating, a large chunk of July was cut out of the calendar for even having races because of other fair ground activities and other nights you would show up and 1/2 the fair grounds that would be parking lot for the race fans was filled with equipment from a equipment auction sale that they'd held there 2 or 3 days prior, why couldn't they have set out the expectation to the auction service that the equipment had to be cleared out or moved within 24 hours or something. It came off as very disrespectful.
The fair board head also throws out that the place ran in the red for so many years, he fails to bring up the fact that the guy that they had running the race track for them was stealing money from them for a long time too and they finally woke up and figured that out and fired him. I knew people that worked the beer garden and they had buckets out every night for tips for the servers and they said at the end of the night everytime that manager would come around and take all the tip buckets and no employee ever saw that tip money. Don't misunderstand me, that was never in the 3 years the Schatz's ran it.
I for 1 am going to miss the Red River Valley Speedway and I do Thank the Schatz's for the attempt at making it go.
http://gph.is/XMLGff
|
