Smith manages Raceway

Craig Smith, formerly of Odessa, is the new general manager at Spokane County Raceway (SCR). He has said he plans to find the same winning combinations there, as he did on the track where he won multiple top-fuel championships and set world records behind the wheel of his race cars.

Smith knows about success on the SCR track. Now he hopes he can translate what it took to win five American Hot Rod Association World Finals top-fuel dragster titles over the years at the Airway Heights strip and drive the facility to rediscover its past popularity.

Smith is taking an approach that has not before been utilized, borrowing pages out of the marketing playbooks of some better known local sports franchises in an effort to build a new base of followers. For those who already have a love of horsepower of all kinds, Smith wants to encourage them to see what’s new in 2012.

The biggest thing is a friendlier ticket price.

“We’re lowering our price to $5 from $10 last year for general admission,” Smith said. “We want to go with the motto of giving back to the community,” to the people of Spokane County who really own the track that Smith’s Raceway Investments company operates.

A bigger project is transformation of the formerly treed area west of the track into a luscious lawn, where any of dozens of area car-club members will be proud to come out, park their hot rods or customs and enjoy the races.

Nearly a dozen trees have been removed and Smith has traded the shade for a big lawn.

The covered shelter will begin functioning as a place to offer additional food and beverage services. The area, which formerly had full access to the pits will now be fenced off to allow it to serve as an additional beer garden. Insurance requires the areas to be separated.

Another amenity to make the track more fan-friendly is the installation of brand new high-quality speakers on each side the drag strip. “We’re putting three new speakers on each side the grandstands,” Smith said, that will allow music to be played during downtime or intermission. Smith would like to have the same atmosphere that is present at Spokane Shock Arena Football games.

And every so often he might employ live bands to entertain from a proposed new stage in front of one of the restroom buildings.

“We want to put up a stage so at the bigger events – we have two big drag races – we want to entertain the fans, too,” Smith said.

While the race cars are what the fans flock to see, the backbone of Spokane County Raceway’s success will come from legions of both local and regional competitors who just race for fun each week.

With the new management in place for 2012, a new focus has been placed on the drivers of classes like Super Pro, Pro, Sportsman, Bikes and the all-important trophy classes.

According to Super Pro racer Bob Hallock, there’s a whole new focus on the bread-and-butter racers – those who come out just to run for a trophy under general manager Smith.

Smith and his crew have been busy, first grinding off the old rubber that made for unstable traction, and then reapplying new rubber and traction compound. That project was accomplished with the use of a brand new tractor Smith bought with a device on the back that has drag-racing slicks that put fresh rubber on the track.

Hallock is the man who kept the drumbeat going over the past two years to encourage operators of the county-owned drag strip and motorsports complex to have a more receptive ear to the little guys – and fans alike.

“We’ve got more races than we’ve had for the last couple of years. Craig’s lowered the fees. What he’s trying to do is what we had all hoped would occur out there (from the beginning). We were getting a pretty bad reputation around the region. The resurfacing, that was a biggie,” Hallock said.

The trophy classes are also a rebuilding factor, Hallock said. He hopes they will get old and new racers alike involved in drag racing. “The vast majority of the support from the track in the past came from the trophy racers,” Hallock explained. “Now the door’s open to them again.”