Home, Hearth on Track : No Dead of Winter for Midget Racing Because It’s Hot Indoors

When the snow is falling and the temperature drops below freezing in the East and Midwest, what do frustrated race drivers do for a fix if they can’t head for tracks in California, Arizona or Florida?

They race indoors, in midgets.

In the Hoosier Dome at Indianapolis the night before the Super Bowl, they rolled up the artificial turf from the Colts’ football field, spread brake fluid over the concrete, stacked some tires around to form the perimeter of a track and went racing.

At first, the surface was so slick it was difficult to walk across, and there was so much contact in the early races that the 1,000-pound midget race cars looked like Bump ‘Em cars at a carnival. But as the evening wore on, the surface became tacky, ideal for sliding the cars around the unbanked corners of a one-sixth mile oval.

By main-event time, a dark groove had emerged on the concrete--the racers’ line. And the racing looked almost like what occurs outdoors on dirt.

“It might not be Belleville (Ill., the Indy 500 of midget racing), or even Ascot, but when it’s January back there, what else is there to do?” said Wally Pankratz, a midget racing veteran from Orange who annually drives at the Hoosier Dome.

An earlier program in the SkyDome at Toronto was similar to the one at Indianapolis--with Coca-Cola syrup instead of brake fluid on the floor yielding the same result--but racing in the Chili Bowl in Tulsa, Okla., is considerably different. Cars there run on a quarter-mile, slightly banked clay oval in the 12-acre Expo Square building--said to be the world’s largest structure of its kind.

Each of the three races attracted an all-star cast of drivers, eager to keep their skills sharp. Of the 48 entries at Indianapolis, 24 came from Indiana, four each from California and Illinois, with Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas, Oregon, Tennessee, New Jersey and North Carolina represented.

The fields included Indy car drivers Tom Sneva, John Andretti, George Snider, Johnny Parsons and Stan Fox; NASCAR Winston Cup veteran Ken Schrader and rookie phenom Jeff Gordon; the World of Outlaws’ Dave Blaney and Sammy Swindell and United States Auto Club champions Mel Kenyon, Robbie Stanley, Stevie Reeves, Russ Gamester and Mike Streicher.

“I like this kind of racing,” Reeves said. “I started out racing quarter-midgets on tiny tracks like this, so I’m used to tight racing. I think it’s great fun, especially when it’s snowing outside.”

Schrader, who usually drives 3,800-pound stock cars, agreed.

“It always works out as the one week we can come back, get to run a midget, get to have some fun, get to see a lot of people that we don’t get to see that often anymore,” Schrader told Dick Mittman of the Indianapolis News. “It’s too much fun not to be here.”

The Hoosier Dome Invitational IX--it’s always held the night before the Super Bowl, hence the Roman numerals--is the oldest continuous indoor race in the country. It’s a wonder it ever survived the first one, in 1985 when promoter Ted Hollingsworth decided to use the newly built $77.5-million downtown Indianapolis facility for open-wheel racing.

“It was one of the worst weekends ever in Indiana,” Hollingsworth recalled. “It was minus-22 degrees outside, and with a gale blowing, they said the wind-chill factor was minus-74. It was 65 inside, but I was worried if anyone would venture out in that kind of weather. When we got between 10,000 and 11,000 spectators that first night, I knew we were on to something.

“The one thing that’s made the race is having name drivers. That first year we had Tim Richmond and Steve Kinser. That was when Richmond had that hot streak in NASCAR (he won seven races), and Kinser was the Outlaws champion. Johnny Rutherford (three-time Indy 500 winner) drove in the second one.”

The late Rich Vogler won the first Hoosier Invitational and two more in 1987 and 1989 before he was killed in a sprint car accident.

This year’s Hoosier Dome race, won by Kenneth Nichols of Indianapolis, attracted a record 17,814 spectators on a rather mild night.

“If you notice, it’s hard to beat these Indiana guys in the Hoosier Dome,” said Stan Fox, the 1988 winner who finished second this year. “They spend half their time racing in the Speedrome, on the south side of town, and it’s a real small asphalt track, a lot like the Dome.”

One of the knocks on indoor racing is that the tracks are so tight there is little chance for passing. But Fox started 12th in the 100-lap Hoosier Dome main event and finished second, nearly catching Nichols, who won from the pole.

Kenny Irwin won from fourth position in the 100-lap race at the SkyDome, passing 1983 Indianapolis 500 winner Tom Sneva for the lead on Lap 25.

Steve Lewis of Laguna Beach, who owns the cars driven by Fox and Reeves, the 1992 USAC midget champion, doesn’t take the indoor races seriously.

“Something like this is more a circus than a race,” Lewis said at the Hoosier Dome. “My program is geared more to the big outdoor races, like the Copper Classic in Arizona and the Turkey Night Grand Prix.”

Fox, driving Lewis’ car, won the final Turkey Night race at Ascot Park in 1990 and again in 1991 at Saugus Speedway. He also won the Copper Classic on Feb. 28.

Tulsa’s Chili Bowl was a week-long racing orgy with more of a carnival atmosphere. Race organizer Emmett Hahn had 759 vehicles--ranging from flat-track motorcycles to Go-Karts, mini-sprints and quarter-midgets--in the STP Tulsa Shootout the weekend before three nights of racing with full midgets.

“It’s the only (racing) show in the country on the first weekend of the year,” Hahn said of the 7-year-old event. “We haul in good racing clay from the old Fairgrounds track, where they used to race cars before they made a horse track out of it. It makes for a great surface, and with the temperature control (inside the building), it never changes.

“The building is so big that we have a quarter-mile track, with about 3 1/2-foot banking, room for 7,500 seats, a parking lot for all the rigs and trailers where the guys can work on their cars. And at the other end is a full-sized basketball court where we hold a charity game between sprint car and midget drivers for charity.”

Dave Blaney, a World of Outlaws sprint car driver from Cortland, Ohio, surprised a Tulsa field that included NASCAR’s Schrader and California Racing Assn. veterans Lealand McSpadden, Ron Shuman, Brent Kaeding and Billy Boat. Blaney’s victory came in the first midget race he ever drove.

Competition was so tight that McSpadden, a CRA champion and a former Chili Bowl winner, failed to qualify.

Indoor racing is nothing new. The first official race inside a building was run Thanksgiving Night in 1934 in the Chicago Armory. That was six months before major league baseball held its first night game in Cincinnati.

Until 1969, when the first Astro Grand Prix was held in the Houston Astrodome, all indoor events were on tenth-mile ovals, almost all set over ice hockey rinks. The Ft. Wayne, Ind., Memorial Coliseum was the busiest, conducting 62 races between 1956 and 1989. Then, the building was remodeled and racing never returned.

The Astro Grand Prix began the use of baseball and football domes for winter racing. Gary Bettenhausen and Lee Kunzman won 100-lap main events in a Saturday night-Sunday afternoon doubleheader in the first year. A.J. Foyt won there in 1970.

Five years later, the Seattle Kingdome was the site of a 100-lap race won by Pancho Carter. The Pontiac Silverdome, football home of the Detroit Lions, also has had races.

Since 1956, at least one race has been held indoors every year, although the number has dwindled from the high mark of 13 in 1988 to three this year.

With outdoor racing available nearly year-round, Southern California has little need for indoor racing. The two attempts at it locally, both in 1968, met with almost total failure.

The late Johnnie Parsons, 1950 Indianapolis 500 winner, promoted what was to have been a 14-week season of three-quarter midget racing at the Forum, shortly after it opened in 1968.

“We’re going to get back all the old Gilmore people,” Parsons said at the time, alluding to the Gilmore Stadium era that was the high-water mark of midget racing in the years just before and after World War II. But it didn’t work out that way.

A curious crowd of 6,882 watched Bullet Joe Garson win the inaugural on Jan. 25, 1968, but the attendance dropped off abruptly after opening night.

A major problem was that the Kings played hockey on Wednesday nights, so defrosting the ice could not begin until 11 p.m. the night before the midget race. Seating in the lower level also had to be removed and a crash wall erected to protect spectators.

Crowds were so disappointing that, after three shows, Parsons moved the venture outdoors to Whiteman Stadium in Pacoima.

Three months later, on April 7, Tommy Walker and Tommy Thompson, promoters of Teen Time USA at the Anaheim Convention Center, decided to include a three-quarter midget race in their program. Walker was a band director and special-events producer, Thompson the owner of radio station KEZY.

Gary Hill of Glendora won the main event and Johnny Parsons Jr. won the trophy dash, but racing never returned to the Convention Center.

“By the time the main event rolled around, there was such a blue haze inside the arena from all the fumes and tire rubber that the fire marshal said, ‘Never again,’ ” said Larry Robinson, now box office manager of the Convention Center.

“The Anaheim race was doomed from the start,” recalled Pankratz. “It was the weekend that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, and most of the sporting events in Southern California were called off that day.”

The San Francisco Cow Palace, Fresno’s Selland Arena, Sacramento’s Arco Arena--both the old one and the new one--and the Oakland Exposition Center, now torn down, also held midget racing programs.

“That Fresno place was a kick,” Pankratz said. “You could get dizzy driving there. We lapped the place in seven seconds. That’s getting back to where you started pretty quick.”