RALEIGH, NC :: Wake County Speedway’s new promoter is excited about the upcoming season and for good reason. Charlie Hansen and his partner Adam Resnick hope to bring new life to a track that fell in to disrepair over the last two decades. Improvements have been made to the 51 year-old facility for both safety and accommodations for fans and drivers.
“We’re pretty excited,” Hansen said about the track opening this upcoming weekend. “There’s a lot of hype surrounding the track. It always makes it better and makes it more enjoyable to work so many hours to get it going.”
“Adam and I both find it enticing that there are a million people within 20 square miles,” Hansen explained. “You look at Bowman Gray and you’ve got 300,000 people around the track. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be half as good as Bowman Gray. We have a 10 year lease so we want to be half as good and consistent as far as fan base and consistency.
“Over the last ten years, there was very little maintenance and upkeep and zero upgrades at the track. As far as upgrades this year, it’s not even comparable to what it was. It’s not even the same place. We have a tech shed, upgraded the bathrooms, painted the walls, poured concrete walls where there was a wooden seawall, we’ve just done a lot of upgrades. It’s been a task. We tore down a 75 foot section of grandstands that weren’t safe. There’s no telling what would’ve happened. We might’ve made the news and not for a good reason. We put in dirt where kids can sit on blankets over there instead. It’s just a lot of small stuff. We put 100 bulbs in the scoreboard. You could hardly read the scoreboard before.
“We’ve tried to keep people updated as best we can through Facebook. It’s just crazy. People can’t even believe it’s the same place. We’ve got an all new sound system for the grandstands and we’ve added more lighting to the track. We also tore down all the billboards on the backstretch that were falling down and weren’t straight and we put all new billboard signs up. It looks professional and it looks like a racetrack.”
Wake County Speedway will open its doors on the track’s 51st season on Friday, April 5th. Hansen is working to get back to the basics.
“To try to predict car counts is trying to pick winning lottery numbers,” Hansen remarked. “You don’t know until they roll through the gates. We have a lot of verbal support. You just do what you do to show it’s a fair place to race. We’re running 20 Late Model races which is, our Late Models feature Southeast Limited Late Model rules. So to have 20 events paying $1200 to win for Limited Late Models, that’s a big deal for those guys to come here to race every week and have a good payout.”
The biggest race of the year for Wake County will be on Labor Day Weekend. They will run races on Friday night and on Saturday night.
“On August 31st, we’ll have the Allison Legacy Series and Mini Mayhem Modifieds here. That’s actually a Saturday show and we’ve never run a Saturday show before. That’s probably the biggest deal on our schedule. We don’t have any touring series planned for this year, we’re focusing on our weekly stuff and we’ll see what happens next year.”
Hansen has been involved in racing in several aspects and brings experience in several levels with him to Wake County.
“I drove back in 1994 and ‘95,” Hansen stated. “In 1997-99, I was the announcer here. I came back and helped them last year for their 50th anniversary. As far as running any operation, this is my first year. I was at Southern National Motorsports Park last year. We owned a dirt track for two years in Henderson and I was a race director elsewhere four years. Everything I put in to place at Southern National last year was from previous experiences in the dirt track world. You treat people fair, you have a rule book and if they’re legal, they know they have a chance. That’s the main thing. Bottom line is you’re selling entertainment so you have to make the racing as entertaining as possible. Inversions, making sure cars are legal by the rule books, doing some heat races instead of time trials.”
Hansen said he would like to make more improvements in the future but it depends on support from fans and drivers.
“We’ve got to crawl before we take off running,” he explained. “Adam’s invested a lot of his personal money to make the upgrades that we’ve made. Hopefully the crowds get better and, if we see that it will, maintain and pay for itself. We hope there will be more upgrades. Hopefully the first upgrade is that we have to add more grandstands. Our seating capacity is about 2500 in the main grandstands.”
Wake County has had a lot of history in 50 yeats and Hansen hopes there will be more history in the future.
“Wake County has a lot of history. Dennis Setzer was a track champion, Loy Allen, Jr. raced here, Randy Renfrow, there’s not the history of Bowman Gray but there’s some history here and it makes it marketable and attractive to fans.”
