Tropicana Field is now the home of the Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball team, but few baseball fans are aware that fire-breathing sprint cars once competed inside the domed stadium located in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Now known as The Trop, Tropicana Field opened in 1990 as the Florida Suncoast Dome and in February of 1992, the facility played host to a pair of World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series events.
National Speed Sport News was there, and the event had more than its share of hiccups, most of them off the race track.
On the quarter-mile race track, the action was predictable as Steve Kinser won Friday night’s preliminary feature and Sammy Swindell claimed Saturday night’s $8,200 top prize after taking the lead from Kinser on lap five.
NSSN Editor Chris Economaki made the trip from Daytona Int’l Speedway along with four NASCAR drivers who were hired to compete in a match race and sign autographs for fans. He described the track in his Editor’s Notebook.
The racing surface consisted of 6,200 cubic yards of clay brought some 30 miles from Brooksville, Fla. (that’s several hundred truckloads, we’re told) and spread out over a distorted oval in the huge cable-supported baseball-designed building.
The track measured 1,440 feet on the outside and 1,120 feet on its inner perimeter with clay about six to eight inches thick on the cement floor. Walls-inner and outer-were the “Jersey Barrier” type concrete borrowed from the defunct St. Pete G.P. street race with wheel fencing still mounted on top.
But unfortunately, the costs of operating inside such a huge facility combined with a small spectator turnout, put promoter Paul Morgan in a corner.
“The event was very well organized with cars entering and exiting the track through separate entrances which made for short intervals between races,” Economaki wrote. “And mikeman Jack Miller, who knows all there is to know about sprint car racing, kept fans well informed. Except for the dismal spectator turnout, it was a great evening, one business people would term an ‘artistic success.'”
But then there was the racer’s side of the story.
The afore-mentioned NASCAR drivers — Ken Schrader, Kyle Petty, Michael Waltrip and Ernie Irvan — returned to Florida without racing when they were told the $5,000 checks each were presented, were no good.
Instead, they were handed an envelope containing $1,700, which according to Schrader, “hardly covers the cost of the flight.” The plane and pilot had been borrowed from Rusty Wallace.
Things got worse on night two.
According to reports, city officials gathered the funds to pay the sprint car drivers for Friday night’s feature so that they would return on Saturday.
But the crowd was no better on Saturday, and sprint car drivers were not paid for their efforts. The purse for the Saturday night program was $39,175.
Years later, many car owners who participated in the event, stood by their claims they were never paid.
Forty World of Outlaws Sprint Cars participated in the program and the TBARA sprint cars and TQ midgets were also on the card.