News from New York state!!
Action Park East has seen its last speedway race and has been officially sold. While it was a sad moment to see the closure of a facility that was an important piece of NY Speedway history it marks the beginning of an awesome and exciting opportunity for the sport. I have purchased a new property in Watkins Glen, the capitol of racing in NY State, and have already been approved by the town board to build a new speedway track there to replace Action Park. The property in Watkins is an existing family fun park with mini golf, an arcade, 2 go-kart tracks and bumper boats plus a nice wooded area for a scrambles course and a pond big enough for winter ice races. The property is just 2 MILES STRAIGHT ON THE SAME ROAD AS THE NASCAR TRACK! This could be huge for our sport and I hope to raise enough funds to be able to have the new speedway track ready for opening this summer. While I am sad to see Action Park go and apologize to those who will miss it, I am proud we were able to bring it back to life for 9 years so that those in the modern generation of speedway could say they raced there and enjoyed it. We had a lot of great times up there!!! In its early years of its second life it thrived on a Sat night but over the past few years when Champion Speedway had to switch back to Saturdays again the two facilities were bumping heads for Sat nights and it was just not making sense anymore. Racing at the new facility will be Friday nights and the upside potential is just much more than what we could do with APE. I want to thank all of the people who supported APE over the years and especially thank Tim Mathewson who worked very hard to help keep it going the past few seasons. Rick Redpath also put a lot of heart and soul into it and I thank him! My enthusiasm for the place had been drained slightly since being burned in a big way finacially by former tenants of the bar and a tenant of the track but those guys kept their energy up! Its new future will be as a baseball driving range and traning ground so at least a high rise will not be built over it and sports will continue. Ironically, Tuff McBride was the tracks first Champion in 1983 and Adam Mittl was its last, both of whom are still racing and took one two in this years overall points chase. The last event ever was this years US Open round and we had a nice crowd and a lot of fun, memories will live on forever!
Jason Bonsignore
posted by Andy at 1:04 PM
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