Indiana Open Wheel - View Single Post

kendirt (Offline)
#14 5/7/25 9:59 PM

Originally Posted by ISF:
There actually was a racetrack on the exact plot of land that contains the present day track. That track began operations in 1948 as Tri-County Speedway and was host to mainly midget racing prior to closing sometime in the mid 1950's. After the original racetrack was done away with a drive-in theater was built on the property in the 1950's and closed sometime in the 1970's and the property laid basically dormant until Tommy Glynn built the present day track that opened in 1986.

The aforementioned late season sprint car event was/is the Bill Waite Jr. Memorial that included the IRA winged sprint cars and the Badger Midgets. At that time the midgets generally put on a great show but later years the Badger guys weren't included and the dirt late models and modified's took their place.

The Bill Waite Jr. Memorial is again on the La Salle Speedway schedule featuring the MOWA and IRA winged sprint cars as well as the Wisconsin wingLESS Sprint Cars which are a crate engine sprint division.

IIRC Sammy Swindell got dinged pretty bad during one of the WoO's Sprint Car events back in the day at La Salle. The track exit opening in the retaining wall was located in turn #3 and Sammy hit it a ton during qualifications, I believe. A couple of dirt late models had some nasty dust-ups in the same area. That's exit opening was closed off quite a while back.

I ran the Badger portion of the 2016 Bill Waite at LaSalle. Badger was there again in 2017, but I didn't go. WingLESS was added in 2018 IIRC.

Our 2016 feature was truly epic.

I chalked Badger being replaced by WingLESS up to them bringing a similar car count with a significantly lower purse. I'm sure IRA lobbied for it as well.

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