Bumpy Beginning : From Bankruptcy, Michigan Track Has Become the Best

Les Richter, who has seen them all in his role as NASCAR competition director, calls Michigan International Speedway “the best facility in the motor racing business.”

MIS, as it is known around the lake-dotted Irish Hills region of rural southern Michigan, where the two-mile high-banked oval track was built in 1968, is the site of three major events a year--Winston Cup stock car races in June and August and an Indy car race the first weekend in August.

“We expect to have the largest paid sporting crowd in Michigan history for the Winston Cup race on August 15,” said Roger Penske, who has owned the 850-acre facility since saving it from bankruptcy in 1973. “Michigan football (106,255 for the 1979 Ohio State game is the record) is the biggest, and we expect to better that.”

At the Marlboro 500 Indy car race, won by Nigel Mansell on Aug. 1, attendance estimates ranged between 60,000 and 70,000. In keeping with other privately owned major tracks, such as Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Daytona International Speedway, no official crowd figures are released.

“Our biggest problem in the turnaround from Indy cars to stock cars is painting over and taking down all the Marlboro signs and putting up Winston,” said Walt Czarnecki, executive vice president of Penske Corp. and president of MIS. “We only have 10 days to change the look of the place.”

It wasn’t always that simple.

The first race in the Penske regime was on June 24, 1973, a Grand National--now Winston Cup--stock car race won by David Pearson. Czarnecki remembers it well.

“Roger and I and Les Richter were out in front selling tickets, directing traffic and checking overnight campers for hideaway fans on Saturday night before the race,” Czarnecki recalled. “We had rolls of tickets with an apron to hold the money. About 3 a.m., a thunderstorm hit and drenched us to the skin.

“Worse, the money got soaked. Have you ever tried to pry apart paper money when it was wet? It’s next to impossible. We didn’t have an office then, so we went to an old farmhouse on the property to count the money. It was all stuck together. We really wondered if we’d made the right decision that night. I think we got about two hours’ sleep and then had to get up and put on the race.”

There will be 12 workers staffing that gate, taking tickets and directing traffic, the night before Sunday’s race. They won’t have to sell tickets--the track is already sold out--and when the money is counted, it will be in the new administration building overlooking the track.

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Groundbreaking for Michigan International Speedway took place on Sept. 28, 1967. A group of businessmen put together by Larry LoPatin, a horse racing track promoter and real estate developer from Detroit, had bought six parcels of farm land for a motor racing facility.

LoPatin’s plan was to build a track along U.S. 12 to bring tourists back to the old Chicago Pike--the main highway linking Detroit and Chicago for nearly a century. When Interstate 94 was built to the north, the freeway bypassed such communities as Ypsilanti, Saline, Clinton and summer resorts in the Irish Hills. LoPatin wanted to revive interest in the area.

Ypsilanti was his first choice, because it was closer to Detroit, but when he made his proposal to the city and the county, he was run out of town. They wanted no part of a noisy race track.

So LoPatin moved west, to the corn fields around Cambridge Junction, a few miles south of Brooklyn. He hired Charles Moneypenny, a San Diego engineer who had designed Daytona International Speedway, to lay out the track. Later, Moneypenny and Formula One driver Stirling Moss designed a four-mile road course that incorporated portions of the speedway.

“It was a sound idea, a good basic venture,” Czarnecki said. “Michigan was a logical place because of its proximity to the motor car industry. The track is only 70 miles from Detroit.”

Penske Corp. moved its corporate headquarters to Detroit three years ago.

LoPatin invested close to $5 million in the site before the first event on Oct. 13, 1968, a 250-mile United States Auto Club Indy car race won by Ronnie Bucknum. Bucknum’s purse of $20,088 was second only to the Indianapolis 500’s winner’s share that year.

Industry sources estimate that it would take $45 million to duplicate the track.

The early success that MIS enjoyed might have brought about its downfall. Pleased with the response to his first venture, LoPatin decided to expand his racing horizon and created American Raceways, Inc.

He built Texas World Speedway in the two-mile-oval image of MIS, bought controlling interest in Riverside International Raceway and Atlanta International Raceway and purchased 600 acres near Cherry Hills, N.J., to build a third two-mile oval.

“Larry was a salesman, maybe the best I ever knew,” said Richter, who ran the Riverside track after a Hall of Fame football career as a Ram linebacker. “He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos and make them think they had a hell of a deal. But about that time, the recession set in and people started asking LoPatin for their payments.

“Michigan was making money, but LoPatin was milking money made there to pay the bills in other places. He was spreading himself too thin, especially considering the way the economy was turning around. When he couldn’t make the payments to the contractor that built the Texas track, the whole thing began to fall apart.”

Richter had become president of American Raceways, Inc., after the sale of Riverside, and when bankruptcy appeared imminent, the creditors turned to him to save the sinking ship. While Richter was negotiating for time, LoPatin went into bankruptcy.

There were two interested bidders, Penske and Pat Patrick, who later teamed to form Championship Auto Racing Teams Inc. to take control of Indy cars everywhere but Indianapolis.

Penske quickly put together a plan to purchase the track with money he would derive from an around-the-clock emissions control test program for American Motors Corp.

“I was already a car owner involved in racing, so when I heard the Michigan track was going into bankruptcy, I was interested,” Penske said. “I had our attorney make a bid. Then I went to American Motors, where I had been involved with their Javelin racing program, and proposed that AMC do its emissions testing program at the track instead of on the city streets of Detroit. We offered an opportunity to run their cars 24 hours a day in 50,000-mile tests.

“When they agreed, it gave me the income to make a tangible bid and cover the mortgage payments.”

It was about that time that Fritz Duda obtained controlling interest in Riverside, which Richter continued to run until 1983, when he went to work for NASCAR. He also was a consultant at Michigan during that period.

LoPatin never returned to racing and died last April at 63 while working on a resort development in northern Michigan.

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Walt Czarnecki was a spectator in the infield for the first Michigan race in 1968. He joined Penske from American Motors two years later and has overseen the development and expansion of the track since that first night when a thunderstorm stuck the money together.

“MIS has grown as a business in an orderly fashion,” Czarnecki said. “As we felt a need for them, we built more seats. But sometimes people don’t realize that when you add seats, you have to add restrooms, concession stands and increase your parking. It’s not just a matter of putting up more stands.”

There are about 78,000 seats now, with plenty of room in the infield for the camper crowd.

“We like to think of MIS as a place for the family to go for entertainment,” Czarnecki said. “We like to ask people why they come here. I asked a 9-year-old the other day, and he said, ‘I’ve been coming here with my dad and mom since I was 3. We come a couple of times a year.’ When I heard that, it dawned on me that we’re into our second generation of fans.

“Years ago, when we were expanding, Joe Dowdall (then a Detroit sportswriter) said, ‘Don’t ever forget the two-dollar bettor.’ And we’ve tried to follow that philosophy, to never forget the family customer. When we had a race postponed for a week a few years ago, we gave back $40,000 in refunds to people who couldn’t come back.”

The success of the track mirrors its owner’s success in racing. Since 1969, Penske-owned cars have won nine Indianapolis 500s, 76 races and eight Indy car championships.

At MIS, Czarnecki also had to overcome ill will left from the LoPatin era.

Chuck Dewey, a retiree from the Jackson city fire department, is co-fire protection director at MIS, but he remembers how things were different 25 years ago.

“Things were really a mess until Roger bought the place,” Dewey said. “Sometimes people weren’t paid, we couldn’t get the proper equipment, things like that. Then Roger came in and showed a genuine interest in us by pitching in where it was needed. He was great for morale.”

Dowdall, who covered MIS from its inception until he retired several years ago, recalled that “for the first few races, there was no traffic pattern, the plumbing was not all connected and the parking lot was dirt, which became a mud bog when it rained.”

To create good will in the neighborhood, Penske organized a charity golf tournament at the Country Club of Jackson that has raised more than $1 million for local hospitals in 13 years.

“Greg Norman played this year,” Czarnecki said. “The tournament was Tuesday before the Indy car race. It was the week after he’d won the British Open, but he kept his commitment. We had 36 touring professionals in the pro-am.”

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Criticism of MIS has centered on the track’s racing surface. Some say it is too fast for Indy cars. Others claim it is often too bumpy for safe racing.

Mario Andretti’s qualifying record of 234.275 m.p.h. this year makes MIS the fastest of all Indy car tracks. It is fourth-fastest for stock cars, behind Talladega, Daytona and Atlanta.

“I’ve heard people say, ‘Michigan is too fast for Indy cars,’ but that is something that must be addressed by the sanctioning body, and I haven’t heard any complaints from them,” Czarnecki said.

The track has been resurfaced twice since it was built, first in 1977 and again in 1986. It was shortly after the ’86 repaving that Rick Mears set the world closed-course Indy car record of 233.934 m.p.h., which stood until Andretti’s run last week.

It was also in ’86 that Richard Petty drove in his 1,000th stock car race on Father’s Day after his daughters, Rebecca, Sharon and Lisa, took the microphone to give the command, “Daddy, start your engine.”

Nigel Mansell, Bobby Rahal and others complained last week of the bumpy surface.

“I’m hanging on everywhere,” Mansell said. “There are three bumps out there where you make sure your tongue is nowhere near your teeth. I tell you, the wall jumps at you in (Turn) 2.”

Penske’s response: “We look at (the surface) every year. Mansell is typically known as a complainer, but he had never driven on high banks before and still managed to run 233 and finish the 500 miles. He should have been here before, when it was a lot bumpier. In fact, it was smoother this year than in 1992.

“We continually check on it. There have been times when we were fixing patches in the middle of the night before the race.

“Take a look at the results (of this year’s Indy car event). During two days of practice, we had only one minor spin out, and during the race, there was only one incident involving a car hitting the wall. I think he (Mansell) was a bit off base with his criticism.”

Czarnecki explained the problems of maintaining the Michigan track: “We don’t have the luxury of being in Florida or somewhere where it doesn’t freeze in the winter. When it gets cold here, the ground freezes beneath the track and when it thaws out, it moves the asphalt around. This creates a bumpy surface, but we check it carefully and smooth everything out as best we can.”

The road course is still there, but has been used only once for a race since the facility changed hands. Penske put on an International Motor Sports Assn. GT race in 1984, but it was not well attended.

“This is not road racing country,” Czarnecki said.

It will be stock car country this weekend. The Busch Grand National race Saturday might attract more spectators than the Indy car race, and Penske has promised more fans Sunday than the Wolverines can cram into Michigan Stadium for the Ohio State game.