Friday nights at a half mile

I have got horn speakers on poles that were put up when my dad ran the place. They are loud. They are not intelligible. There is a difference and every short track promoter in America knows exactly what I mean — you can hear that Denny is saying something, you cannot hear what, because there are twenty four late models on the track with open headers and you are competing with about a hundred and ten decibels of that.

So the lineup goes out and nobody in the grandstand knows it. The cautions go out and nobody knows why. A guy gets sent to the tail for jumping a restart and the whole grandstand thinks the flagman is blind, because they did not hear the call, and they boo, and Denny explains it and nobody hears that either.

That is not a nice-to-have problem. Not understanding whats going on is the number one reason a casual person comes once and does not come back. The hardcores know the rulebook. Everybody else is watching cars go in a circle with an occasional unexplained interruption.

We put the announcer on a pass this year. Three dollars a night, fifty for the season, and free with a pit pass because pit crews wanted it more than anybody and I was not going to nickel and dime my own racers.

Grandstand take-up was fine. What I did not expect at all was the campground. We have got about ninety camper spots and on a saturday night theres people sitting outside their campers who have been at the track since thursday and have zero ability to hear anything from where they are. Almost all of them bought one. And the infield — car owners, families, people who are twenty feet from the racing and have never once been able to hear the call of it.

The other one was people at home listening to a dirt track in a county of eleven thousand people. I sold passes to Ohio. I do not know anybody in Ohio. Turns out theres a guy who used to race here in the 90s who moved away and now buys every friday, and he found us because somebody put it in a facebook group. That is not a business plan, thats just a nice thing, but it added up to real money over twenty eight nights.

My honest advice is start with the announcer and only the announcer. I got asked about doing scanner traffic and team channels and I looked at it, and between our sanctioning body's rules on radio traffic and the fact that officials and safety comms have got no business on a consumer data connection, I left all of that alone. The call of the race is the thing people are missing anyway.