Supporters of the Southside Speedway revival rallied during an open-house forum at Clover Hill High School in July. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
When the last checkered flag waved at Southside Speedway before the COVID-19 pandemic, few would have thought it might be the final lap at the 60-year-old track. Of course, the pandemic wreaked havoc on many local businesses, including the local racetrack, which lost a year of revenue, crippling its finances. But now a group called Competitive Racing Investments LLC is hoping to purchase the track — which was bought by the Chesterfield Economic Development Authority in 2021 for $4.5 million — and reopen it.
“It was sad to see Southside go away because there’s so much history and so many great drivers it produced,” says Chris Phelps, who raced there from 1990 to 2001. “It’s a tough place to run. Turns 1 and 2 are different than Turns 3 and 4. It’s one of those tracks where you have to know what’s going on.”
Martyn Thake, president of Motorsports Consulting Services LLC, was hired by Chesterfield County to review necessary safety upgrades to the speedway. According to Thake’s report, issued in November, the track’s surface, outside retaining wall, catch fences and grandstands must all be updated or replaced at a cost potentially equivalent to building a new facility altogether. However, Lin O’Neill, who started an organization called Save Southside Speedway and leads Competitive Racing Investments, believes that the track’s surface does not need to be repaved.
“Old short-track racers will tell you that an old surface races better than a new one,” O’Neill explains. “It wouldn’t be safe for Indy cars, but it would be perfectly safe for late-model stock cars and modifieds.” As an example, he points to North Wilkesboro Speedway, a former NASCAR Cup Series short track in North Carolina that was unused for over 25 years before being reopened — without a repave — to great fanfare in fall 2022.
O’Neill is also high on the potential economic benefit for the county. “A lot of people don’t realize how many people are involved at the racetrack,” he says. “My own race team, Lin O’Neill Racing, is a $200,000 race team that started here in 1979, and I’ve been paying taxes ever since.”
In his report, Thake is less optimistic. “I have heard that there is a local group that [is] saying that basically they can come in, clean up a few things and be running next weekend,” he writes. “That is NOT the case, in my opinion, the facility is unsafe and needs comprehensive rehabilitation to bring it up to current safety standards.”
We don’t want it to be a 1980s racetrack, we want it to be a 2023 racetrack. ... We want to have other events.
—Lin O’Neill
In November, the Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the Genito/288 Special Focus Area Plan, a zoning plan for a 659-acre area that includes the speedway. The plan calls for further development in the area besides the racetrack, including a 100-room hotel, restaurants and retail development. It does not preclude reviving the raceway, but it doesn’t guarantee a comeback, either.
“To make the racetrack successful, it will take someone like a promoter who will open it up to things besides racing,” Phelps says. “Up the road [in Spotsylvania County], Dominion Raceway does a whole pile of things to keep people coming in. These days, you have to get a market share in creative ways.”
This is a prospect in which O’Neill is interested. “We don’t want it to be a 1980s racetrack, we want it to be a 2023 racetrack,” he says. “We want to have other events — concerts, drive-in movies on the Jumbotron, festivals, car shows, trade shows.” Before closure, the racetrack also had a relationship with Virginia Commonwealth University as a destination for engineering students to hold internships.
It remains to be seen whether O’Neill and his group will manage to complete the purchase, but he is optimistic about his chances, as well as the future of racing in general. “Some of the interest has fallen away at the national level, but regionally, racetracks are still doing well,” he says. “There are other series besides NASCAR, like the Superstar Racing Experience and the CARS Tour. We want to save this track so there is something for future generations to enjoy.”
