Where Is Our Sport Heading? Where Will It Be In Five Years?

Column By: TOBY LAGRANGE / RPW – GLOVERSVILLE, NY – It is Easter morning in the LaGrange household, and all is quiet. Everyone is still sound asleep, including my twelve week old son, Sammy. With the house so quiet you can hear a pin drop I decide that it is a perfect time to sit down and pen this column. But there is just one problem. There was no racing this weekend due to Mother Nature. So I picked up my lap top and pulled up a seat next to my sleeping little man.

As I sit here watching him sleep so peacefully, I wonder to myself what kind of world will he grow up in? My thoughts turn to our great sport of motorsports and what it will look like in five years when he is old enough to really get into it.

It was three and a half decades ago that my mom introduced me to racing. She brought me to the Fonda Speedway for the first time when I was three years old and then, a year later, would bring me each and every week. I didn’t miss another week until I graduated high school and then not another until I was in my mid-thirties. To say that the clay of the ‘Track of Champions’ runs through my veins is an understatement.

The first question that came to mind was, will there even be motorsports as we know it locally in five or ten years? If so, what will it look like and where will it happen? Many more questions came to mind.

Just then our amazing dog Shiloh joined me next to his bassinet. She laid down at my feet and I thought to myself how much I have changed since our Sammy was born and our family began to grow.

The racing world is a much different place than when I was being introduced to the sport. Today, Internet message boards, Facebook and Twitter have replaced pre-race tailgate sessions for much of the fan base and childish political fighting has done more harm to the sport than anyone cares to admit. No longer are you face to face with someone discussing the merits of this and that. Instead, you can remain an unknown person and spread your opinion like the Bubonic Plague.

Politics have always been a part of racing, or any sport for that matter. Today, though, with the help of social media and the ability to spread what the person next to you said with a click of a button before their sentence is even finished, the effects are much more devastating.

If we have any chance of passing our great sport down to our children, their children and their children, the childish games need to stop. The days of hatred between track promoters needs to end, as does the practice of punishing those who try and promote all racing regardless of which track they are at.

We, as a racing family, need to come together and work together. We need to end the Hatfield and McCoy-type of rivalries between tracks. As the years go on, new technology becomes more and more available to everyone…which means more competition for the consumer’s (aka race fans) entertainment dollar. One look at the grandstand and car counts at most facilities shows that motorsports is losing that battle.

Fan and participant counts are not always the end all when determining the success of a track. Sometimes, it’s the mere location of the facility that guarantees success. If another option were closer, the tables may be turned.

To succeed, local racing needs to embrace the future while still working in some of the past (for example, track history), so those on both sides of the fences can appreciate what they have and what came before them. The most important thing a track promoter can remember is to promote to your audience and treat everyone, including other promoters and those who support all tracks, like you would your family. After all we are one big family.

As my son starts to squirm and is ready to enjoy his first Easter, his eyes open and I pray that he is able to enjoy the sport that I grew up enjoying. I hope in five or ten years he will get the same enjoyment that I did, but if not, he will end up like many others and find something else to do on Friday or Saturday nights.

For the good and future of the sport, let’s all work together so the next generation will have no interest in looking elsewhere.