PORTLAND SPEEDWAY’S DIAMOND ANNIVERSARY SEASON TO FEATURE ‘GREATEST SHOW ON DIRT’

PORTLAND, Ore. - When Portland Speedway promoter Craig Armstrong returned to his office following a trip south to see the World of Outlaws in 1995 -- his staff will testify -- he could hardly contain his excitement. Emphatically uttering "those guys put on a hell of a show" at the mention of WoO from that day forward, Armstrong, along with Western Speedways, Inc. partner Ken Clapp, eyed the thunderous, 850-horsepower winged Sprint Car series with intent to bring them to the confines of their Portland, Ore. half-mile oval track.

With the recent announcement from WoO that Portland Speedway will be among the 46 tracks included in its aggressive, 73-event national sweep next season, Clapp and Armstrong will see their dream materialize into reality sooner than the duo had ever imagined. But with the marquee event will come a major change in the very fabric of the venue as fans prepare to celebrate the track’s 75th anniversary in the year 2000. Most notably, Armstrong and Clapp will convert the racing surface -- paved since 1946 -- to dirt for the Friday and Saturday night, August 25 and 26, 2000 race dates.

To Ted Johnson, Founder and President of the Pennzoil World of Outlaw Series, it comes as no surprise that track owners would tear up their asphalt to get a date with his wildly popular, nationally televised, dirt-only series, and get in on the massive ticket sales that traditionally follow WoO from venue to venue.

Adding five tracks to his national tour in 2000 -- including Portland, Texas Motor Speedway, Lowes Motor Speedway (in Charlotte, NC), Bristol Motor Speedway, and Joplin 66 Speedway -- Johnson is growing his winged Sprint Car series at an impressive rate.

"We’ve got Portland (converting) their track for the World of Outlaws, and now we have the superspeedways also building tracks for us," said Johnson. "It’s gratifying. It’s a lot of hard work by a lot of people. Of course, our racing is exciting, too. We bring a different type of racing of which a lot of people are not used to seeing."

But more people are seeing it every year, with Johnson adding nine tracks to the WoO schedule since the close of the 1998 season.

"We come into an area that we haven’t been in -- a venue that we haven’t been to before -- and, all of a sudden, we turn track records. With the combination that we have -- an eleven-hundred-forty-pound car turning close to 850 horsepower -- it’s like a little bomb going around the race track.

Riding those bombs to an explosive career, Steve Kinser is the undisputed "King of Sprint Car Racing." With 424 victories and 15 WoO series titles, Kinser, of Bloomington, Indiana, finished third in the 1999 WoO national point standings behind his cousin Mark Kinser and Danny "The Dude" Lasoski, and will headline a contingent of WoO stars in the inaugural Portland Speedway event.

"Any time we can get around to markets with more population -- anytime we can get to a new race track -- it helps the series," said Kinser of the Portland race. "Wherever we go, we draw from a three-state area. The Pacific Northwest is an area that we don’t get to do a lot of racing in. Having another track there keeps a lot of people from having to drive a long way to see us race. It’s a real exciting sport and it has a good following. So, it’s nice to make it a little easier for the fans to get to us."

Fans are the bottom line to promoters, and the series’ following is what Clapp and Armstrong are banking on. For Portland Speedway, WoO’s success at the box office would replace revenue potential lost with the passing of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event over to the Portland International Raceway road course in 1999, and re-establish "open wheel" racing as a viable format on the speedway’s storied oval track.

"We’ve come full circle at this grand old facility," Clapp, a retired NASCAR Vice President stated. "She started life as a dirt oval, had a half-century run with asphalt, and now returns to the clay. It’s a significant evolution in motorsports entertainment, and we’re proud to be a part of it."

Qualifying for NASCAR’s prestigious Weekly Racing Series sanctioning agreement since 1984, Portland Speedway also hosts two of NASCAR’s biggest regional and international asphalt touring series, the NASCAR Raybestos Brakes Northwest Series, and the venerable NASCAR Winston West Series.

According to Armstrong, the track will run a slightly shortened asphalt season -- including its popular weekly NASCAR "Fast Friday" and NASCAR touring series events -- through the end of July, 2000, then begin the massive job of conversion with a ground-breaking ceremony following the track’s final asphalt event, the traditional NASCAR Winston West Series 200-lap race on Sunday, July 30.

"We have our work cut out for us," said Armstrong of the transition. "But we believe that we have the time to get the job done right. This track is sitting on top of an old Columbia River flood plain. 150 years ago, the entire property used to sit under water every spring. As a result, the ground is mostly made up of silt and clay. We’re going to have to bring in what should be a minimal amount of additional clay. When we’re all done mixing the two, we should have one of the best clay racing surfaces in the Pacific Northwest."

After making the switch to dirt to conclude the track’s seventy-fifth anniversary season, following the WoO event and at least two dirt stock car shows in September of 2000, Armstrong said his main goal will be to effect as little disruption as possible to his growing, weekly NASCAR stock car racing program in the year 2001.