Originally Posted by Pat O'Connor Fan:
A sanctioning body and some promoters get together to provide 4 consecutive nights of midget racing over here in tin-top and wing country, and right away Indiana folks are making fun of it 
I think Jerry will want to attend the Macon, Saturday June 8th, 2103 event so he can once again wax poetic about driving thru the Illinois corn and soybean fields to get to Macon. See ya there, buddy! 
You gave me an idea, Steve. Since we're going to do Illinois Midget Week, let's go to Macon. This is one of the coolest tracks, in one of the neatest settings in the world. These stories are from 2009 and 2010, but since this area hasn't changed too much in the last 50 years or so, they should still apply:
Originally Posted by Jerry Shaw:
My friends at Mapquest, God bless their hearts, do their best to get you to your intended destination in the shortest possible time. Many times they do so by using the age old principle of "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line." This often, like today, leads you off the beaten path. I started out on the familiar main arteries of US-63 North and US-36 West. Mileage wise, these two main roads took the lion's share of my trip. From there, they sent me deep into the rural Illinois agricultural countryside. This time of year, the corn is ten feet high. And when it’s planted close to the road and it’s on both sides, you feel like you’re driving in a tunnel. You take that tunnel long enough, add in several 90 degree turns and that tunnel becomes a maze. A Maze of maize. And since the roads aren’t necessarily marked all that well in the country, I wasn’t exactly sure that I was on the the specific roads I was supposed to be on. But having grown up in rural Clay County, Indiana I knew the best way to navigate this type of terrain was to use the occasional bean field to scan the horizon. Every little village of 500 people or more in the agricultural world has it’s own clump of huge grain bins. Each one, like a fingerprint, is unique to that town. The first one I saw turned out to be the skyline of Dalton City. That meant that next up would be the little racing town of Macon. And as I approached the next one, I saw what looked like a sleepy little town on the front edge, but towards the back edge you could see parked cars bulging out into both sides of the street. I knew that meant they were either having a livestock auction, there was a Jonah Fish Fry up ahead or that I had found Macon Speedway. Luckily for me it was the latter.
After being pointed to my parking spot way out in the back forty, I declined the golf cart shuttle ride that they were providing, so I could get the circulation going again in my legs, after a long drive and also take in the sights of this little country track I had never seen before. I went to the gate and got a pit pass. The first thing obvious was that there were a ton of micro midgets in the house, tonight. And as I got around to the end of the track, it was just as obvious that the midget division pond was stocked, big time! I saw Tony Stewart, Dave Darland, Bryan Clauson, Brett Anderson, Brad Kuhn, Brad Loyet, Brent Beauchamp and Shane Hmiel to name a few. And big groups of people were gathered around Kenny Schrader and Kenny Wallace, who would be driving modifieds tonight. Not bad for a Wednesday night way out in farm land, huh? It’s an ample facility, too. Plenty of seating. A scoring tower in the middle of the track. There’s even a lounge, complete with neon signs, in turn 4. It’s a nice higher banked dark dirt oval, that even though they list it as a 1/5 mile track, it looks a little bigger than that and races quite a bit bigger than that. And the racing in all three divisions turned out to be excellent.
Kenny Wallace may act goofy when they put him on these NASCAR shows, but when you put him in a modified and show him a green flag, you see real quick how he earned the right to act goofy in front of the NASCAR cameras. He can flat out take one of those big sleds and throw it around a bullring fast, with amazing precision. And he had to as Tim Hancock and the aforementioned Schrader were on their game this night, as well.
The 600cc Micro feature was even better. The whole race was complete chaos, especially the furious first half battle for the lead. Guys like Joe Miller and Dereck King riding the fence. Others diving for the tires. Slide jobs, bicycling, jumping the cushion. You name it, you had it. And once Miller got the lead for good, it got even more interesting. It was almost Clayton-esque the way he was playing with fire, using the cushion the way he was. It had already drawn several drivers into that wall and it wasn’t done, yet.
The first thing worth mentioning was that we were starting a POWRI Midget feature without either Brad Kuhn or Brad Loyet. Loyet had been sent home for a very, very, very ill-advised slide job that smashed Joey Moughan into the wall. There was no way for Joey to evade it, as Loyet came all the way from the bottom of the track to run into him up near the top groove. It was such a bad deal that the many in the crowd were actually trying to egg Joey on, once climbed out of his car, to go to the opposite side of the track and get Brad. The officials were there to prevent that from happening and eventually they made the right call, IMO. And from what I was told, Brad Kuhn’s motor gave up the ghost and he was never a factor, all evening. Shane Hmiel took early command and led until Anderson slid him for the lead and never looked back. There was a lot of great racing throughout the field, as Brent Beauchamp recovered from an early race Tommy Tipover that sent he and Bryan Clauson to the back. Brent passed a bunch of cars, but was collected when Stewart was sucked into the wall, on lap 23. That was also minor roll over that the work area crew (they do a good job of this, at this track) were able to fix and send the guy back out on the track. Bryan Clauson bided his time, then punched the time clock and made a tear through the field starting on lap twenty or so. And all the while, there was Dave Darland sneaking up through the field in one of the coolest looking midgets out there. On one yellow, late in the race, there he was sitting in third and you just had the feeling Anderson’s moments as the leader might be numbered. But hey, the defending POWRI Champ has been counted out before and here he still is. And when the checker flew, there he still was.
I may have went through a maze to get there, but you know how those type of experiments work. If there is a nice piece of cheese at the end of the maze, then the mouse feels amply rewarded and finds his way through the maze more easily the next time. After my first Macon Speedway experience, this mouse can probably find his way back to this place, blindfolded.
Jerry
Originally Posted by Jerry Shaw:
The first thing that strikes you when you make a trek across US Highway 36, is how straight the roadway is. It is literally as straight as an arrow. An arrow that has been shot straight through the heart if Illinois. And right through that of America, for that matter. For this is a path that takes you through the very center of America’s agricultural heartland.
The second thing that is blatantly obvious, when you’re in this part of our country is the absolute perfect order in which everything is situated. The majority of the real estate is occupied by fields, that are dedicated to specific crops. These fields are perfectly square, and the rows or corn or beans are straight enough that it looks like a t-square could have been used to place each one. Countless walls of corn, surrounding carpeted rooms of beans. Dotted with numerous clumps of trees and woods, whose members are all proportional to one another.
Also, along with the fields of crops, are pastures that contain cattle. And although there is no cow manual or there is no cow congress, there is still a perfectly uniform order in which they manage to conduct their daily activities. The females raise and tend to their young, while the bull stands guard, assuring that no one or nothing interferes with this cycle of life. All while their babies play. And the rest of their energy is devoted to slowly wandering around, finding nourishment.
Being immersed in perfect such natural order for the time it takes to drive through a hundred miles or so of it, is relaxing. Therapeutic, even.
Then you get to the final destination of this journey. The small farm town that you’ve arrived at doesn’t look like anything out of the ordinary. Like all the other villiages you’ve went through or passed near, it is a clump of houses, featuring the skyscraper of the rural world, a column of grain elevators. On the very west edge of this little country town sets a dirt oval, surrounded by grandstands. And gathered around the outside of this circuit are a few rings of race cars and race car haulers. Then evenly placed rows of automobiles and motor homes. Then you stand in a single file line to get your ticket, pass through the gate and proceed to the seat you choose.
Shortly after you’ve chosen where you want to view the evening’s entertainment from, race cars appear on the track, circling slowly. Then a man stationed on the inside of the front stretch waves a piece of cloth just as green as the landscape of this farming state you spent the last couple of hours driving across. Only this time green doesn’t represent peacefulness, calmness and natural order. Quite the contrary. It means all of those things have been shattered and are about to become a distant memory. The next four hours of your life will be about total warfare, chaos and competitors, with the help of their machines, trying to tell their version of how the order of things should be. The small bullring configuration of this arena and your proximity to all of the action only intensifies how you experience this event. The roar of some of the motors and the scream of others pushes your sense of hearing to it’s limits. The closeness of the cars cause the methanol to burn your eyes more than normal and have more of a taste than you’re accustom to. Your nearness to the racing action causes the brightly colored racing machines to fly across your field of vision at a rate that upsets your equilibrium, until your brain adjusts it’s self to it. And your sense of touch is awakened, as you’re beaned by a high-speed clod of mud. When the final checker is thrown, you leave having really experienced a night of racing, at Macon Speedway.
So, all in one afternoon and evening, you’ve been exposed to both the serene splendor of natural order and chaotic wonder of man-made disorder. What a night!!
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.
Winston Churchill
