(This week, major management and perhaps ownership changes were announced for Nelson Ledges Road Course. These changes might eventually include the closure and/or sale of the track. We asked noted NLRC racer and LeMons stalwart Daniel Sycks to write a piece in reflection — JB)
Change is never easy. It doesn’t matter if its a relationship, your drive to work, the packaging of your favorite breakfast cereal, we humans are creatures of habit and we like continuity and familiarity. Its part of what keeps our simple little brains happy. Sadly, change is part of life.
Evolution happens and things progress if we like it or not. Changes happened recently at Nelson Ledges Road Course in Garrettsville, Ohio; now I feel like I have lost a dear friend.
NLRC is a favorite old track of mine. Well, maybe it’s more of a love-hate relationship and I know a great many racers who feel the same way about it. As a crapcan racer I have spent many long hours there on cool foggy miserable fall nights there in Chumpcar 25 hour races, following by my swearing that “I WILL NEVER COME BACK TO THIS TRACK”. When it rains, there is only about 20 square feet of dry earth in the acres of in-track paddock area. The showers are not lush, the toilets could be better. You get the idea.
The surface of the track has not been good for the decade I have been attending this track, even though the current surface represents a significant upgrade over what it was as late as 2002. It’s never once been described by anyone as lush or placid. In the same way that VIR is a “racing resort”, Nelson Ledges is “primitive camping”. I recall my first fun day there being greeted by a flag station signal that I don’t think I have ever seen anywhere else, two socks up means I must assume that all is well as that station is able to kick back and display its ankle length crews.
After any trip to NLRC, any animosity starts to fade and within hours. Given a few weeks you are looking forward to more. That track makes masochists out of otherwise ordinary enthusiasts. There is some sort of special magic in the flow from turn to turn. Get turn one JUST right and you fly/slide/glide into turn two. Carry speed there and you cut a second off your lap and you fly into three. Get around the carousel any way you can as there really is NO right way. Just carry speed onto the back and pucker up tight and don’t lift for the kink, if you do you lose two more seconds.
Hold fast but don’t you dare go two wide… Now gather up your courage and brake like you mean it and toss your car left and tuck in right as hear comes the front straight. In a fast car its maybe a minute twenty. In a slow car maybe a minute thirty but no matter how long it takes you are going to want to fight that track all day to do it a second faster than you did your last lap. Its painfully addictive.
No matter what, no matter how questionable the grounds were, the staff has always been A+. They were warm, welcoming, friendly and simply a joy to be around. As such, many of the racers I know and think highly of count Bryan Bartzi and Kerri Lane as friends and members of their race family. I do as well. As such it really hurt this week to find out they don’t seem to be part of the future plans at NLRC.
I have no moralistic feelings nor have I drawn conclusions about what should or should not have happened. Its not my track and its not my money involved and I do not have all the information involved as to why this change happened. I do know thanks to well placed sources and public comments that a motorcycle group that makes regular trips to Nelson had issue with the surface when they ran there a few weeks ago. I know they were not happy with the surface and that they seem to have given an ultimatum to the ownership regarding the direction of the track. Sadly, the change that then happened seems to have been the cost of those who have invested countless hours over the last 40 or so years in what has in effect been one of the very last of the family run race tracks in America.
Maybe this is the start of something better for NLRC? Maybe this will be a painful bump in the road and better days are just around the corner? I really hope so as there is something special about the flow of that nasty, narrow little track. I am sure however that there is no Facilities Fairy. There will be no Pavement Gnomes who sneak out in the wee small hours of the morning and do magic to the surface. There are no Drainage Trolls who will fix the surface water issues or Paddock Elves who will grace the track with spacious showers or other amenities. This will all take real dollars and real investment that has never been offered.
I do hope that this is the start of something better. I hope its the start of something better for those who have been turned away from a life’s passion. I hope that they are rewarded somehow with new opportunities and new challenges. I hope that NLRC finds the investment that it needs to continue on. I feel reasonably sure that it has however lost in that some of its best resources are now gone. Change is painful. Lets hope there is some good to follow.
I’ve got allot of laps on Nelson too, from both front seats. I think the benefit is the costs to run there. The track was at the bottom of everyone’s list at one of the Car & Driver One Lap events. Where can you go on Friday Fun Dayz to tune your ride and not worry about snobbery of running a lesser car. Not sure what happened with the motorcycle guys as it’s been a few years since I’ve run 80 seconds laps in C32 and CTS-V, but even running the course in reverse was fun!
Almost like Cars & Coffee for the track junkies!
And now we know a 3-Series will spank a Phaeton on the track!
I’m guessing it was the 8 and not the 12.
It’s the classic 5200lb sedan on all-seasons vs. 3100lb sedan on R-comps and coilovers battle!
I just hope the track still stays up and running, growing up I’ve seen two good tracks loose out to urban sprawl, Mid-America Raceway and an old dirt oval.
I bet if we had more tracks around we’d have less street racing.
I miss MAR. Not to mention balling the jack up the front straightaway, cresting to level and going “C’mon, drop, c’mon settle, Turn 1 is coming!” Then nailing the brakes and downshifting to cut that 110-degree right-hander. What a gut check!
There was a runoff, but it wasn’t enough. I remember distinctly watching Roger McCluskey and Bobby Unser climb the hill outside of Turn 1 when they both lost a game of chicken in a USAC stock car race. And me steadily blowing the brakes, then the transmission out of a castoff Hemi Charger trying to haul it down lap after lap. It was fun, while it lasted …
I never had the chance to see MAR in its prime, by the time I was born it was just a drag strip with the track too worn out to be usable.
I need to post some old pics somewhere though, my Dad got some when e was young. I went out there last year just to see if I could collect some buried souvenirs.
The only things remaining were the two poles for the welcoming sign, and some land formationsgravel roads. What littles left is used to hold construction equipment, and is normally gated off.
Someone did save the tower and now has it in their backyard, I’ve been trying to contact them to take a look.
In the spring of 1978, MAR was the site of my first SCCA driver’s school. The track was always my favorite. Think of driving through a city park at racing speed. Because of nearby trees, hills and gullies, going off the track could be a painful, not just expensive, experience. In addition to elevation changes, there were changes in both grade and camber part way through corners. Was it dangerous? To quote the chief instructor at my driver’s school, “If you stay on the track, it’s not dangerous.”
I am out of the loop, the article doesn’t say what the “change” is, a brief google search turns up nothing, and the track’s website is still active. Explanation?
I’ve never ridden there, but I have friends who ran endurance races (motorcycle) there years ago, and they all said the track was brutal.
I agree. Along with the fact that the author has some minor but irritating issues with homophones, I simply do not understand what he’s talking about.
A personnel change in the management of the track.
I agree that it would have been nice to have some background on what is happening, but I appreciate the ode to a track.
It would be great to have a review of the Thunderhill expansion…
It’s like a bad Facebook status.
On and on and on and on and on. Around paragraph 8, there’s an indirect allusion to something which has happened, but apparently it would be too simple to simply state it. No, better to ramble on circumlocuting it, and expect readers to intuit it from between the lines.
Would it kill to just report what has happened?
+1
As long as I’ve been involved in racing, and that’s been a very long time, people have been complaining about the surface at Nelson Ledges, and I’ve never even been there.
This is one of the tracks on my bucket list to drive on.
This has always been one of the tracks on my Bucket List NOT to drive on.
Notoriously poor track surface, primitive facilities — c’mon, we can do better than that.
All may not be lost, even if the names are changing.
Hallett Motor Racing Circuit in Oklahoma is also one of those family owned tracks that had been getting a bit too long in the tooth for the motorcycle guys. The Stevens family found a way to entirely repave about 3/4 of the track, and fix a number of edge-of-the-track issues.
In the month or so since, cars and bikes alike report its a whole new track, and track records are falling quickly.
Perhaps, with any luck, Nelson’s new owners have a home improvement loan lined up.
I remember my first trip to Nelson in 1993. They’d built a new shower/restroom building, but the township wouldn’t let them turn on the water supply to it.
I got the impression, every time I went to the track, that the owners wanted to do so much with it, but every time they went to seek permitting, the township threw up another expensive-to-remedy roadblock. That said, the folks there are some of the best, and the track has a certain charm to it.
There’s primitive-and-charming (Nelson) and there’s not-even-terribly-primitive-but-reeking-of-post-apocalyptic-horrors (Texas World Speedway).
I hope the new owners are able to keep the place available as a racing venue. TWS looks likely to be having bulldozers come in next year and finish what bad soil prep & subsidence have started (memo: do not buy a house located anywhere near NASCAR 3 & 4 or the tri-oval unless you like retrofitting foundation piers to bedrock…)
Finally, something has turned up (elsewhere) about what happened.
http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/nelson-ledges-road-course-activities-suspended-indefini-1578466953?fb_action_ids=10201167443067934&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B878799175480053%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D
More details:
http://www.mvrscca.org/Nelson%20Ledges.pdf