Get out and Race
By
Jeffrey Fazio
DriveTime Columnist
April
showers brought May flowers, for some people. For the rest of us,
April meant the beginning of the race season in the Northeast. Now
that May is upon us, and the race season is in full swing, there are
plenty of opportunities to take your car off the street and drive it
onto the racetrack where it really belongs.
Eastern
Pennsylvania is an ideal place to live if you enjoy racing. There is a
huge array of legal racing venues for you to satisfy your hunger for
speed and you can even do it in the car you drive every day. Racing is
a great way to release that built-up I-want-to-go-fast energy.
Let’s
take a look at our options.
Drag
Racing
Starting
off right here in Berks County, we are home to Maple Grove Raceway (www.maplegroveraceway.com).
This is a ¼-mile drag strip that frequently offers "Grudge
Racing" on Friday nights. Grudge racing is just open track time
to race your friends or the random person in the other lane. In
addition to the grudge racing, Maple Grove hosts many other events
that are open to all to enter.
In
addition to Maple Grove, we are fortunate to have five other drag
strips within two hours of Berks County that offer drag racing that is
open to the general public (listed in order closest to Reading):
•
Cecil County Dragway, Rising Sun, Md., www.cecilcountydragway.com
•
Numidia Raceway, Numidia, Pa., www.numidiaraceway.com
•
Island Dragway, Great Meadows, N.J., www.islanddragway.com
• Atco Raceway, Atco, N.J., www.atcorace.com
•
Old Bridge Township’s Raceway Park, Englishtown, N.J., www.etownraceway.com
Hillclimbs
Another
Berks County option for racing is our local hillclimbs, Pagoda and
Duryea. They take place, respectively, in June and August. These two
events are part of a series of hillclimb races that take place all
over Pennsylvania. Details on all of the hillclimb races can be found
on the Pennsylvania Hill Association’s Web site, www.pahillclimb.org.
Although you can enter your street-driven car in these events, you
will need some added safety equipment; please see the PHA Web site for
details.
Solo2/Autocross
One
the safest ways to explore the limits of your car is with Sports Car
Club of America’s Solo2 autocross events. These events offer
challenging temporary courses set up in large parking lots. There are
a large number of autocrosses in our region. The Northeast
Pennsylvania region of the SCCA, www.nepa-scca.com,
holds autocrosses as close as Frackville, Schuylkill County, and the
Susquehanna region of SCCA, www.scca-susq.com,
hosts these events as close as Hershey. If you are willing to travel a
bit farther you can check out the events put on by the Philadelphia
region, www.phillyscca.com.
For an even broader look at the regional autocross scene, check out www.autox4u.com.
Road
Courses
If
you are feeling more adventurous, the northeast United States has
plenty of racetracks and a plethora of organizations that can get you
onto them.
Some
of the most notable tracks in our region (listed in order closest to
Reading):
•
Pocono Raceway, Long Pond, Pa., www.poconoraceway.com
•
Summit Point Motorsports Park, Summit Point, W.V., www.summitpoint-raceway.com
•
Lime Rock Park, Lime Rock, Conn., www.limerock.com
•
Watkins Glen International, Watkins Glen, N.Y., www.theglen.com
•
BeaveRun, Wampum, Pa., www.beaverun.com
It’s
great to know about these tracks, but it is more important to know
what organizations can get you out there turning laps. Each one of the
following organizations has its own rules for technical and safety
inspections. They also can be very different in how they operate their
track days. That being said, I am listing these organizations simply
as a resource. I would recommend doing further research before you
decide to attend one of their events. Lastly, I suspect this list is
not comprehensive as it only includes the organizations that I have
researched while looking for safe ways to test my car and my driving.
Here
are some of the organizations that can get you some seat time on a
real racetrack:
•
Sports Car Club of America, www.scca.net
•
National Auto Sport Association, www.nasaproracing.com
•
Performance Drivers Association, www.pdadrivingschool.com
•
Eastern Motorsport Racing Association, www.emraracing.org
If
you want to pursue some legal motorsports, I highly encourage you to
look into the facilities and organizations listed above. All of them
have been extremely helpful with my questions and they always seem
eager to help out newcomers.
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