Full Throttle

Remember when you were about to enter the difficult but exciting teenage years? For the boys the slightest hint of hair started to sprout on the upper lip. Hoping to help the grass grow into a more predominate appendage they follow the prevailing advice. Shave it. Often.

For the girls it was a slightly different problem and approach to it. Plucking the newly noticeable hair was said to discourage the underbrush. Shaving it would create an Amazon-like forest.

Despite NASCAR’s long history and with the shaving of Staten Island from any future expansion plans you have to wonder if NASCAR has entered its pre-teen years.

Race tracks are sprouting like pre-teen peach fuzz.

The Fresno Bee reports of two new projects on the Left Coast. The first has already been covered, as the Tulare Turkey. The second, the $250 million Riverside Motorsports Park, is located at the opposite end of the central San Joaquin Valley and 100 miles further north.

Former driver Kenny Shepherd is among a group of investors planning to build the new facility on 1,000 acres of farmland next to the former Castle Air Force Base in Atwater California.

Riverside “is a motor sports dream,” says Shepherd, a Merced native who raced often at Madera Speedway. “It’s a facility for every type of racing.”

The Merced County planning commission voted 5-0 in October to recommend Riverside for approval by the Board of Supervisors. At just short of one mile in length the site would also feature a road course, two dirt tracks, a go-kart track and seating for 30,000.

Shepherd claims Riverside isn’t “designed to host Nextel Cup races” although it would be hard to envision the track being successful without at least a couple dates by NASCAR’s WHELEN All-American Series.

The Board of Supervisors are expected to decide Riverside’s fate on Tuesday of this week.

Next time someone waxes nostalgic about the old Daytona Beach Course, Lee Petty or other NASCAR antiquities remind them of all the new “hair growing” around the country and how the sanctioning body is just now entering its “pre-teen” years.

Apparently.

NASCAR, NEXTEL Cup, Sports, Whelen All American Series, Auto Racing, Motorsports, Full Throttle