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Last week was a struggle from the moment I got out of bed until late Friday evening.
I was bombarded with phone calls and messages giving me weather reports. It is really one of the most difficult situations when it comes to operating a race track.
There are so many things involved that the average person does not see or understand and I never believed in "can't win" situations. I have always believed that there is a way to win at anything.
Thursday night I got upwards of 10 messages to cancel early, so we don't make the drive for nothing and cost all our teams and fans money. Friday morning, for every message I received that said the weather was going to be OK, I would receive another message saying, "The National Weather Service at 2 p.m. says showers and thunderstorms likely before 7 p.m. Then a chance of thunderstorms mainly between 7-10 p.m."
The thought of having everyone pull from hundreds of miles away and our fans traveling once again paying hard-earned money to get into our speedway and support us, and once again getting rained out before the feature events, was very unsettling with us. We got rained out before the feature events twice this year and it cost everyone a lot of money.
But the worst part about it was the weather predictions for the evening were all very good. So, once again, the difficulty of making the decision is a constant struggle. Hypothetically, say we did race. Remember the "can't win" situation I was talking about? Whenever you race during a threat for bad weather, your crowd suffers.
That's not to mention that the Upper Peninsula State Fair was going on, the Green Bay Packers were playing at home and some high school football teams were also starting their seasons.
So, now we went out there and got lucky, and got to do what we love to do, which is race cars and everyone is patting each other on the back, and it's all puppies and kittens, until you make your bank deposit and you have to pay your drivers and you have to pay your bills. Then, it doesn't seem like the right decision was made at all.
I told the Board of Directors at 10 a.m. in the morning that we could not cancel due to financial reasons. It had to be raining or at least a strong threat of rain. That was a very selfish and very irresponsible thing to say on my part.
Our treasurer, Scott Stanchina, handles the money and he's done an exceptional job with it. I kind of need to stay in my lane.
There's no one on planet Earth that wanted to race worse than we did. You must remember this board and this organization basically raced through a global pandemic and prospered in doing so. But, at the end of the day, Norway Speedway is a business and difficult decisions must be made. I apologize to all that were hurt or disappointed, our great fans, our great competitors and everyone else.
Moving on to this week, we have one of the Midwest's most awesome, amazing and exciting travelling racing series visiting Norway Speedway. The Impact Survival Series is owned by legendary track promoter Matt Rowe from Maribel, Wis.
The front-wheel drive series is known for its talented drivers and car fabricators, as well as providing the excitement of a 300-lap race with 75 to 100 cars. This is not something you see in any other forms of auto racing.
This is a great weekend for our local businesses, as there are drivers competing from three states. The weekend is fun because I get to sit back in my wrecker and enjoy all our local drivers that are going to be doing their best to represent Norway Speedway against all the travelers coming in and trying to win the big money.
Our local drivers include Elliott Reid, Dean Bellmore, Zachary Krans, Zach Hanson, Savanna Novara, Stuart Hornick, Sophie Hornick, Cole Brown, Dylan Tirschel, Isaac Bray and hopefully everyone is sitting down when they read this, Joey Pontbriand. This is by far our biggest and talented contingency of locals to take on the travelers.
I'm excited for Norway Speedway ticket taker Margaret Bray. She finally gets to watch her son compete at his home track. Isaac, by the way, is very skillful, not only as a driver, but as a car builder and one of my favorites to win the event.
I hope everyone is out there Saturday watching all these young guns checkering or wreckering.