CONCORD, N.C. — Racers always seem to find ways to race, though as the United States continues to grapple with the COVID-19 virus, racing is becoming more difficult to find.
However, a few members of the racing fraternity have decided that if they can’t go to the races, they’ll bring the racing to them.
Among them are Willie Mullins, a part-time ARCA Menards Series racer who built a small bullring on some family property in Virginia in an effort to help pass the time since he can’t be at a race track.
He said the idea to build his track, which he and his wife Dinah have dubbed White Oak Speedway, came from a conversation he had last year, but the time and the motivation to build it didn’t come until racing was stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Honestly, it just came from me and a friend, Darrell Ferree, shooting some ideas around back in November when we were bored,” Mullins recalled. “We said, ‘Hey, we should build a track.’ I had enough room down at my parents’ house, I knew where the good dirt was. Then December rolls around and we’re in full Daytona (prep) mode. So then that idea gets pushed off.”
Fast-forward a few months and suddenly Mullins and Ferree found themselves with some spare time. The next thing they knew, they had built a small dirt track for go-karts.
“We never thought about it anymore until the first part of our local season got canceled,” Mullins said. “We just kind of kicked the idea around and then Davey Callihan, one of our local racers, came by the shop and said, ‘Willie, we really need to do this.’
“So I got with Darrell and said let’s build this track that we’ve been talking about. I borrowed a bobcat from SKS Construction, a friend of mine, and that’s how it started. We started building the track one weekend and we thought it would take a week or two to build it and we built it in a day and a half.”
Now Mullins and his wife host a weekly karting session for a handful of friends at the track. They’re even live streaming the races via Facebook so other friends can watch and enjoy the fun.
“A bunch of us friends right now are just having fun while we can’t go real racing,” Mullins said.
Mullins isn’t the only driver to scratch the racing itch by building a go-kart track during these strange times. Ohio-based sprint car racer Lee Jacobs had previously built a small dirt karting track on his property for himself and his children to play on prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.
However, now that he has a lot of extra free time, he decided to expand the track and make it a little bit bigger to accommodate more karts — and perhaps a little higher speed.
“When we first built our house here a few years ago, I put a track in right away,” Jacobs said. “We didn’t do a whole lot with it. We just kind of played on it with a yard kart and stuff like that. Now with all this downtime I decided we needed to make a bigger race track and really get involved. We went from one kart to we have three karts now. We’re just slowly growing it.”
Jacobs said he’s already had friends pestering him about coming over and racing, though with the current limitations on group gatherings he’s not sure when that may happen.
“I’ve got a lot of friends already talking about wanting to come over and race,” Jacobs said with a laugh. “With this whole quarantine thing and us still in shutdown I don’t know if we’re going to get anyone over here or not. Once I get the thing really nice and smooth then we’ll start having some races here.”
Click here to continue reading.