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CHighAZ-
Bravo for putting that perspective on it. I can see selling at the profit offered. I can see the purchaser wanting to make their usage quickly, but what galls me is that this looks so much like Take The Money And Run. Surely a track like Manzanita could have a "Final Season Farewell" that would be worthy of the Nostalgia that so many of us have for this mecca of dirt track racing. And in a state that has perpetual warm to hot to really hot weather, I can't be led to believe that the seasonal particulars lorded over the insistence that bulldozers begin moving in less than a month.
The season was set, and as you note, sponsors were secured, plans made, parts purchased and cars readied. I'll accept the inevitable ends of most dirt tracks in my lifetime, and it WILL make me cherish the ones I see today, and take my son to. But to have ZERO forenotice of this evaporation of a place with the legacy of Manzy just does not sit well.
I truly hope that another track emerges in the area (Paging Humpy Wheeler! Attention Tony Stewart!), but my guess is if it does appear, it will of course sit outside one of the turns at PIR and race about four shows a year and look like Vegas' surface. The Phoenix area is growing, frankly, quicker than it should, so I understand that real estate values for commercial purposes are going to put a crimp in anyone's plans to open an independent oval dirt track that won't be soon encroached upon and rendered into yet another truck-driving school, interstate warehouse or strip mall. Let alone one that is any kind of convenient short hop from any residential areas.
I, personally, would have made absolutely certain to get back there for one last weekend (perhaps two) if I would have known the time was this short. I would have bought my last ticket, my last rack of ribs, burrito, Foster's and shirts and programs, and reflected on the times I spent there with my father, brother, son, cousins and uncle, as well as so many friends and racers. At its best Manzanita was in the pantheon of great historical half-miles in history. That history will have to suffice for all of us now.
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