It may be called Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, but the biggest event on the Lexington, Ohio, racetrack’s calendar is actually its annual AMA Superbike weekend. For this season, you can make that weekends (plural), as the circuit is hosting two stops on the AMA Superbike tour—the August 18-20 event and the September 30-October 1 finale. Yesterday, we had a long talk with track president Michelle Truman, whose father purchased the now-44-year-old circuit back in 1980, and who is heading up the major improvements that are going hand-in-hand with the ramped-up plans for ’06. Most of that conversation follows:
By CJ
Photos by CJ

RRX: How’s the weather back in Ohio these days?
Michelle Trueman: [Laughs] Rainy and gray.

I bet. I know you guys have a lot of plans for the track. Are you able to do any of it during this season ?
We’re about halfway through the process right now. We had hoped to be a little further along at this point. We got very optimistic early this fall because it stayed warm for a long time, then we ended up having our coldest December in history, so that set us back a little bit. Obviously, when we laid the plans out, we made contingencies for weather since we all know we can’t control it. We’re doing a lot of work that’s not weather-sensitive right now. As far as the paving and such goes, it’s about 50 percent of the way done, and it will be finished up as soon as we can get some consistent 50-degree days.

Can you give me a bit of a synopsis on the work that’s being done?
Basically, the track as a whole is just getting a major facelift. It encapsulates the whole thing. The track is being totally repaved, and in many areas, the foundation itself is being rebuilt with that. Improved drainage systems are going to be added, and we’re replacing all of the curbing around the racetrack. We’re adding two connectors—one near turn 1 and one up near the Keyhole area—so we can have different configurations of the racetrack and have multiple uses at any given time. We’re also changing many of the runoff areas and improving the sand traps. We’re moving barriers. The majority of the catch fencing, I believe, [that] was left to be upgraded over the last couple of years, will be finished in the Spring. There’s the resurfacing of pit lane as well. That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell.

That’s pretty extensive. What was the impetus to do all this?
Well, this is something we’ve been discussing doing for over three years. Obviously, funding is paramount to getting this done when we wanted to do it, and I think the thing that’s probably slowed it down more than anything is making sure we had enough information to do what we wanted to do and do it right, from our perspective—taking safety, competition, and the integrity of the track configuration itself into consideration.

Is it better to do it all in one shot, as opposed to picking, say, a corner per year?
Well, we looked at that somewhere along the way several years ago, when we started to have some real issues with attrition of the surface. We were going to do, say, a quarter of it this year and a quarter next year—do it over a four-year time period. When we added it up, we decided we’d be chasing our tail. At the end of the day, while the cash outlay would be broken up over four years, it wasn’t going to be any less expensive. It’s like renovating a house: once you tear the walls down, you’d better look at every aspect of it and do it all at one time, because you don’t want to tear it up or do it a second time.

You want to have an overall plan that’s well thought-out.
Right, because when you’re dealing with the racetrack, when you start tearing things apart, you’ve got to look at the cause and effect of that—what else are we going to damage in the meantime—and that oftentimes limits how far into certain projects you might want to get at any given time. We’re obviously very restricted by weather in the time period we have to do this work every year, which is really about a three- to four-month window. Typically, a project like this, I think our contractors would have much rather preferred to have a 12-month window to get it done. But we have a great partner, Kokosing Construction. This is obviously a very unique project, as it would be for most contractors.

What was the secret to getting the funding? That must have been a major obstacle to overcome.
Sitting down and taking a big gulp! [laughs] There was no secret in it. It was really putting the plan together and making sure we [addressed] everything that we wanted to do in that time period. I didn’t want that a year from now, [Mid-Ohio Vice President] Dennis [Rhee] and I would be standing out there looking at the facility and going, “Oh, I wish we’d have done this or done that.” We really wanted it to be as comprehensive as possible. The money was set aside to do this, and like I said, we’ve been talking about it really for three years. In our case, we have the balance between cars, bikes, driving schools, and things like that to consider, and we had to make sure that all those entities were going to be served well by the changes and modifications we were doing.

As far as your spectator events go, how big is the AMA race on your schedule?
Right now, the Honda Super Cycle weekend is the largest event we have on our schedule, and second to that is the Vintage Motorcycle Days.

So motorcycles are very important.
Right. Motorcycle racing has become very paramount to our business plans.

There are also some exciting plans with your track getting two AMA race weekends, including the final. How did that all come about?
Well, I think the conversation for this literally started about a year-and-a-half ago at our Superbike event in July [2004], when Dennis and I sat down with Scott Hollingsworth from the AMA and talked about their future and our existing event. As a company, we very much want to support the AMA and their growth and be a part of something that we certainly believe in, going forward. Out of that conversation came the idea that the series needs to have an event that is unique and that can really encapsulate and highlight what superbike racing in this country’s all about. We threw a bunch of ideas out on the table, and it’s taken every bit of 12 to 16 months to get this put together.

I personally feel somewhat responsible for the future of the sport. We’ve been around for as long as—if not longer than—the majority of the promoters, with the exception of Daytona, and this will be our 25 th consecutive year of running superbike racing. Obviously, when you look at that investment, you feel like you want to have a little bit of say in the future, and I don’t mean that to come off in any sort of way that is cocky or arrogant. I think it’s incumbent on us to take an interest in our future, and with all the other properties the AMA has, it seems to us that the Superbike series deserves a little more attention. That’s part of the reason we pushed them to move forward with this finale shootout concept in the fall.

The other important aspect was the amateur-racing program [Road Race Grand Championships] that they’re trying to develop, and dovetailing the two together. We’re going to have a lot more details to talk about on that soon, but the idea is to create a platform, spotlight your primary series, and also use the opportunity to take the amateur program and develop it a little further, while working with the other groups out there that are also running amateur programs.

Don’t get me wrong; we’re very much in partnership with the AMA in working through this on a day-to-day basis on how this event will be structured and what will set it apart. We just recently spoke to [AMA Road Race Manager] Ron Barrick, and I think we’re very close to finalizing the details of the format. It will be very exciting, and from what we’re told, it seems to have great buy-in and support from the riders, teams, and sponsors, and the competition board, which is important.

Can you provide any details on the amateur race?
It’s going to be moved to immediately precede the superbike event in the fall. It will have its own weekend date. [Editor’s note: In the past, the event has been held midweek, between the VMD and the AMA Superbike weekend.] As I said, it’s our intent and hope that it’s going to be a collaboration with the other entities out there promoting amateur racing.

Whenever I go to Ohio, I’m impressed and surprised by the population of motorcyclists, so I guess having two AMA race weekends is warranted.
We’re very fortunate to have, per capita, the largest number of bikes registered in the country. Obviously, being the home of the AMA probably has a little bit to do with it. The largest saturation of dealerships is within about a four-state area of where we are. All that played into the growth of our Honda Super Cycle weekend. Obviously, our ongoing relationship with Honda played a big part in that as well, and all their sport bikes are built in this state. KTM has their home in this state as well, so there are a lot of factors. I think a lot of people are very surprised when you start throwing out Ohio’s statistics. They’re significant figures.

When do you expect the track work to be completed?
Can you tell me when we’re going to get some warm weather? [laughs] I think we need about five-to-seven days of consistently 50-degree weather. At the latest, it’s going to be in March—that’s our fallback position at this point in time. In the meantime, they’re doing other things—all the non-asphalt-related activities, from curbing, to fencing, to sand traps, to tire barriers. That’s all going on. We’re going to have some pretty interesting numbers to share with everybody when this is all done; you’ll see the number of man-hours, plus everything from tires, to linear feet of fencing, to tonnage of asphalt. This undertaking is pretty phenomenal.

As part of our business model going forward, motorcycle racing and motorcycles in general are going to play a very big part. We’ve had to really reevaluate our business model over the last five-to-10 years, looking at where we’re going to be in the future and what’s going to get us there. We’re seeing fragmentation in car racing, and the dilution of that industry on many levels has made it very difficult to rely fully on that from a revenue standpoint. When you look at the balance sheet and things that have continued to grow and flourish, our motorcycle events have done well. With the riders and clubs in the Midwest area, it’s almost a no-brainer to put much more emphasis on motorcycle racing.

Well, that’s great for motorcycle racing fans to hear. Who knows, maybe if this all goes well, it will soon be called Mid-Ohio Motorcycle Course!
[Laughs] Yeah, there’s people on the other side of the street that might not like that too well! Honestly, we’ve had people question that, trust me. We’re never going to go away from our roots, but if you look back 25 years, you can say that motorcycle racing is fast becoming a part of our history as well.