The season finale at Magnolia Motor Speedway happened much like the season opener.
It didn’t.
Rain, as has been the theme for much of the 2015 race season, washed out what was supposed to be a big-money cap to the Magnolia schedule: the $50,000-purse, Carl Hogan USCS Fall Brawl.
Strangely enough, rain forced track owner Johnny Stokes to postpone and later cancel another USCS event at the beginning of the year, the Frostbuster 250. Both events were to feature former NASCAR Sprint Cup driver and longtime Sprint Cup driver Kenny Schrader.
Stokes said he doesn’t plan to make up the event, which would have featured multiple sprint races and the usual lineup of late models, street stocks and factory stocks that would have started Friday and continued Saturday.
“It’s about impossible to reschedule a race getting this close to Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Stokes said. “The weather, too, at this point in the year, is always hard to work around.”
In all, eight race nights out of a possible 34, which includes multi-night events, at Magnolia were postponed or canceled due to inclement weather.
“It’s an all-time high for me,” Stokes said. “It’s tough to deal with, but we had a really good year, though. There were a lot of good races.”
Columbus Speedway saw nearly a third of its races postponed or canceled due to rain, including its season opener. Joe Ables, track manager at Columbus, said he sees the loss in revenue, especially since there’s no way to gain it back. He said rescheduling any part of the season is difficult because of alternate scheduling with Magnolia, and college football seasons once September begins.
“When you get to this point in the year, you can’t compete against Alabama football,” Ables said. “You just have to take the good with the bad, suck it up and take it. There’s no gain backs. One of these big races, through the years, you could change it. But when football starts, our races end. It kills us.”
Columbus’ final race of the year will be the Possum Town Grand Prix on Nov. 20-21.
At Magnolia, which plays host to a half-dozen national series events each year, canceling a weekend’s worth of races can affect revenues much greater than a night of weekly points races. When CompCams, Lucas Oil, or USCS schedules a race with Magnolia, Stokes rents the track to the organization for a fee and gets the concessions revenues.
“You feel it when you go into the winter, and that’s money you won’t see until March, especially with this last race,” Stokes said. “But we got most of our big shows in, and it won’t affect the schedule for next year.”
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