Fan Stories About PRP
The 08 Schedule and sponsorships are quickly taking shape. As always, opening night will depend on the cooperation of Mother Nature and more specifically flood water, but all of us at PRP highly anticipate the start of what promises to be another great season.
As the annual PRP Kickoff Classic draws near, more details of this coming season will be provided. In the mean time, we would like to hear about some of your fondest memories regarding a PRP race. Feel free to e-mail your stories and recollections to chuckgreenslate@yahoo.com. You might want to relive a fond finish, a wild wreck, an unforgettable charge to the front, a memorable race move, or even your own personal race-day story.
Let your mind wander, and provide us with as much entertainment as you can until the green flag drops on the 2008 Portsmouth Raceway Park season.
Below are a couple of recollections from PRP announcer Chuck Greenslate.
There have been a lot of great finishes and unforgettable crashes at Portsmouth Raceway, and I’ve been lucky enough to see just about all of them.
When it comes to finishes, the one that immediately pops in my head is the Chub Frank-Billy Drake battle from a few years back. Frank had led pretty much the entire race, but on the white flag lap, Drake went to the bottom side in turn one. They made contact. Chubzilla slid high off of two, and Drake shot underneath and appeared to be well on his way to victory.
However, after Frank got the 1* straightened out, he flatfooted it, slung it sideways about 25 yards shy of the entrance to turn three, cut down into the infield, nearly hit the light pole, passed Drake off of turn four, slid high towards the wall, and held off a cross-over maneuver by Drake to win the race by mere feet at the finish line.
That was one of PRP’s best-ever finishes, but there have been many others. Sticking with Chub Frank, he and Delmas Conley went back and forth in the closing laps of a big show a few years ago swapping the lead multiple times in the final five laps. What was so entertaining about that race was how high Conley was running and how hard he was driving. He was up in no-man’s land that night, and he made it work. That was impressive.
Some of the closest finishes have come in the Modified and Bomber Divisions, as have some of the wildest wrecks. Of all the craziest crashes that have taken place at PRP down through the years, one that sticks out to me was a Bomber accident back in the early 90’s. Now that was long before I was employed by PRP. I was still in high school, but boy, as a fan in the stands, I had never been so freaked out in all my life at a race. I know that racecars are really put together well these days, but I really thought I had seen a fatality on this night. A Bomber driver apparently blew a tire off of turn four. The car turned sideways and the wheel which housed the blown tire dug into the surface of the track and sent the car barrel-rolling down the front straightaway.
It’s been so long ago, I can’t remember the driver’s name, but I’ll never forget what I saw. From my seat in the stands, it appeared the racer was coming out of the window of the racecar. All I saw was his white driver’s suit flopping around violently as the car tumbled over and over and over again.
The whole crowd just simultaneously gasped for breath and went dead silent. It turned out it was just his arm which came out the window, and the way the car was rolling, it evidently never came down on the racer’s limb. From everything I heard later, the driver walked away with nothing more than a dislocated shoulder.
All I know is that the guy’s arm must have been four feet long because I really thought he was coming out of the car from the waist up. As a result of this incident, PRP implemented a window-net rule that is still in place today.
In addition to all of the great finishes, bad wrecks, and awesome moves, I have a ton of my own personal race-day stories. When I was younger, going to the races with my dad was the highlight of the summer. We had one section we always sat in. The same group of people was always around us. And we had a couple of specific items from Mrs. C’s Concessions that we always ate. (For me, the night always started with Nachos and Cheese covered with jalapeno peppers. It ended with a hot dog smothered in sauce, onions, and mustard. There were a whole lot of Pepsis in between.)
Like a lot of younger race fans, there were certain things I had to do before Dad would take me to the races. I had to have the grass cut. There was even a few Saturdays back when I was a teenager that Dad and I had to get all of our hay bails up before coming to the track.
As for some of my more stupid tricks when I was a teenager, there were times I came to the track and forgot my goggles, forgot my coat, and for whatever reason, wore brand new, bright-white tennis shoes which didn’t look too new by the night’s end. However, of all my wild race-day stories, one comes to the forefront of my memory, and it really doesn’t have a thing to do with racing.
There was one summer Saturday. I was probably 17 or 18 years old. It was really breezy that day, and before I went to the races, the rule was the grass had to be mowed. I was in my parents’ backyard with our push mower trimming around the 10,000 trees that Mom and Dad were so nice enough to have cut down within a year after I moved out and went college.
The wind was really blowing, which felt great on a hot summer day. I was zipping right along and was getting ready to mow around the last of all our trees when I heard this humming noise approaching my right ear.
Less than a second after hearing what turned out to be a big, buzzing beetle that must have been flying 25 mph with this stiff breeze at its back, I felt something shoot into my ear. It felt like someone rammed a Q-tip into my ear hole.
You’ve probably guessed it. It was this beetle, and it was one of those big hard-shelled things that always get in your swimming pool and cling to the bug-dipping net with their prickly little legs.
This little fellow flew right into my ear and lodged himself there. Now if you’ve never had a bug fly into your ear before, your first reaction is to stick your finger in that ear, and that’s really a bad decision because you just wind up pushing the bug further back into your ear canal just as I did.
After, pulling my finger out of my ear, I let go of the push mower, so it would shut itself off. Then, I tried to figure out what to do about this bug in my ear. I had hoped it would moonwalk its way out, but it was buried in there pretty deep. It felt like I had a cotton ball crammed inside my head.
I waited for a couple of seconds. I could feel that things prickly old legs squirming around in my ear, and then it happened. It began flapping its wings inside my ear, and I thought I was going to die. It was like Rambo was inside my head firing a machine gun. Better yet, it was like a helicopter was in-between my ears.
I began jumping up and down, hitting the side of my head like you would trying to get ketchup out of a glass Heinz 57 bottle, and saying words that ordinarily don’t come out of my mouth.
I’m usually pretty level headed, but the freakout fest was on!!! I ran into the house and tried to explain to my mom what was going on, and then she started freaking out.
She was running the vacuum when I stormed in, and she was using her 30-year-old Electrolux which had the power nozzle hooked into the body of the sweeper that she had to drag behind her. (Since this ordeal occurred, Mom has gotten with the times and purchased a standup sweeper.)
I told her to take the carpet cleaning attachment off the end of the power nozzle and see if she couldn’t get the bug out of my ear with the vacuum. Believe you me, you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to suck a beetle out of your ear with a vacuum cleaner.
It was a nice try, but it didn’t work. My brother came to get me in our dad’s pickup, but just as he got set to take me to the emergency room, the bug backed it’s way out of my ear and flew off.
Dad and I still made it to the races at PRP that night, and with my freshly cleaned out ear thanks to that little beetle, those racecar engines never sounded so good!!!
SHARE YOUR STORIES WITH US, AND WE’LL POST THEM ON THE PRP WEBSITE.
March 30, 2008 ** Marybeth McWharter:
I love going to Portmouth Raceway Park. I think it is my favorite track to go to. I don't really have a certain story but I do have a few good memories from the 2007 season. My then boyfriend now husband took me to the track for the first time and I loved it. I was pregnant that summer and on one of the big race nights for the late models, I remember them going around the track real fast and it was very loud and the baby had kicked me for the first time. Then I remember the very last night of races as being the most "entertaining" because there were a few disagreements out on the track and I hadn't ever seen that happen before. I just have to say that I love the track and itend to keep on going back and bringing our son because I know he'll love it just as much as we do. I'd say he'll probably end up racing there because his dad has raced bombers there and hopefully not in the too far future late models.
April 24, 2008 ** Craig Shaw:
One moment I remember is the first hot lap at PRP after the track was enlarged to 3/8 mile a few years ago. Audie Swartz took a wild ride down the back stretch, totally destroying his car. Audie wasn't hurt, but the car was in pieces. It was the first time I ever saw a complete rear axel and wheel assembly come off of a car.
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