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NNS: Sun Sets On The Mile
The Milwaukee Mile will , after 106 years, be mostly quiet this summer...
RacinToday.com Staff  | http://www.RacinToday.com  |  Posted December 18, 2009   Milwaukee, WI
NASCAR racing at the Milwaukee Mile is headed into the sunset. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Article by Dave Kallmann - Guest Columnist, RacinToday.com

You can’t feel sad for a racetrack.

It has no heart. It’s really nothing more than asphalt and concrete and steel, hotdog wrappers, beer stains, tire bits and dust.

So that empty feeling, that sorrow, must be for memories of the Milwaukee Mile that will continue to fade. For the echoes of cheers powerful enough to overpower engines, the likes of which may never be heard again. For the oldsters who can say that they whooped it up when A.J. went wheel to wheel with Parnelli or that they were on hand to see Jim Clark make rear-engine history. And for the youngsters who never had a chance to see the next Foyt, the next Andretti, the next Earnhardt or Wallace or Dixon or Patrick blister the asphalt under a bright summer sun.

She is gone, folks. Finished, at least for now.

For 106 years, the Mile was a part of an international racing culture, built earlier than Indy and rightly claiming to be the oldest continuously operating speedway in America.

Now, after a fruitless search for a person or group to promote races, she’ll sit mostly silent next summer.

The board of directors for State Fair Park, the grounds on which the track is located, finally admitted defeat Wednesday. There will be no major racing in 2010. The Indy Racing League pulled out in August, and now NASCAR will follow. There’ll be a few car shows perhaps and some Sprint Cup Series testing, no doubt, considering the Mile is no longer a part of any of the three national series. Maybe some regional stock-car series will rent the track and put on a race in front of a few hundred fans.

But the Mile has too much history to call that a life.

While no one in any sport cares to concede, this has been a long time coming. The board members will continue to be torn up mercilessly by fans and talk-radio screamers. While they share in the blame it’s impossible to keep track of every misstep, mistake and incidence of mismanagement.

For starters, the place got old, racing changed and the Mile struggled to keep up. A crowd of 20,000 may have been good for a USAC race in the 1960s, but those numbers stopped making money in the 1990s if not sooner. Even with a redone grandstand and 40,000 seats – which, by the way, were rarely full – how could the Mile and its blue-collar market possibly compete against the 150,000-seat stadiums in Las Vegas and the Dallas and Chicago markets?


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