Between the Races: Chris Gallas

AMA Pro Road Racing returns to Heartland Park Topeka this weekend for the first time in seventeen years. With series participants already beginning to trickle in to the 780-acre facility, we checked in with HPT director of sales Chris Gallas for a preview of what riders and spectators will encounter at the almost-new Round 9.

How are final preparations going?
Real good I think. For the course itself we’re all set—we got the Alpha wall down and everything and we’re getting up all the AirFence today. I’d say we’re just doing all the last-minute preparations that every track goes through right before they get bikes on track. The riders, as they come in here, none of them have really been here before so I think a lot of them are kind of in awe a little bit about how big this facility is, because it’s 780 acres, so it’s a little bit different from some of the facilities they’ve been to that have their road course kind of compacted into a 280-acre area.

How would you describe HPT to someone who hadn’t been there before?
Well, it’s kind of a multi-purpose facility. We have a drag strip, and our big event there is the NHRA national event. We have a 3/8 dirt mile track that we run a weekly dirt series on, and we also have some late-model demolition derbies and stuff. And then we have our road course, and the longest part—the part they’re racing this weekend—is 2.5 miles, but there are four or five different configurations that could shorten it a little bit, and obviously the AMA event is the highlight of what happens there.

Give us a run-through of how HPT returned to the AMA schedule.
Roger Edmondson is friends with Raymond Erwin, the owner here, and they’ve known each other a long time. Roger approached Raymond, probably in late ’08, and asked him if he might be interested in doing a race out here. This is our twenty-first year and there hadn’t been an AMA race here since 1991, so obviously we took that as a great compliment for us and were immediately very interested.

So we kind of worked through the process, talked with them, and everything ended up getting worked out. [AMA Pro] came out in January and brought a safety committee in, the safety committee gave us their concerns in terms of what they deemed not safe, and basically we pretty much honored everything they wanted changed. The big one was the wall in the first turn, and that one we thought we were going to do in 2010, but we ended up doing it sooner.

HPT has hosted amateur racing through the past few years—what’s the area like in terms of motorcycle enthusiasts?
Yeah, we’d had CCS, AHRMA, and Kansas City is a very big bike town. There are a lot of motorcycle dealerships, and we’ve had a pretty good response from the dealers we’ve been working with. There have been about forty-five dealerships that have been selling tickets for the race on behalf of us, and most of them have sold out the allotment of tickets they were given. So I think everyone’s pretty enthused, and obviously being the new event, it’s something different and I think it’s drawing a different type of crowd for us. It’s not going to be our typical crowd that we have for NHRA or anything like that, so bringing out new people is always great.

What kind of special events do you have planned?
Tonight we’re having a kick-off party at Hooters that some of the riders will be at and we’ll have some bikes on display, and we’ll have a fan party and autograph session on Friday night out at the track, and then on Saturday night we’ll have our weekly dirt series going on, and we’re letting everyone who has an AMA ticket into that for free, too.

What would you say to fans who might not be inclined to think of Kansas as a hot spot for race viewing?
Well, we can run pretty much any type of racing—I mean, we could probably run a NASCAR race if we wanted to—so that shows our versatility. But basically I’d just say this is a world-class facility and there’s probably nothing within a thousand miles of here that even comes close.