Huset’s Speedway
Soggy Huset's hustling ahead of Lucas Oil visit
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt.com staff reporter
Flooding at Huset's Speedway. (husetsspeedway.com)
After severe flooding swept across Huset’s Speedway over the weekend, general manager Doug Johnson and his crew have begun cleanup on the still-soggy grounds of the Brandon, S.D., facility.
Most of the standing water around the third-mile oval subsided Monday, the aftermath of an intense storm last Wednesday that escalated into a full-blown flood Friday morning when nearby Split Rock Creek overflowed from its banks. The area's 7 inches of rainfall was the wettest over a two-day period in history.
A return to racing July 7 for the speedway’s weekly sprint car series remains a “confident” goal for Johnson, who’s been in charge of a cleanup crew that’s been “working pretty much around the clock to get things cleaned up and put back in place.”
That also means the speedway’s on track to host July 18-20’s Silver Dollar Nationals sanctioned by the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series.
“Yeah it’s been pretty busy. The main thing has been letting the water recede and letting it go down,” Johnson told DirtonDirt.com in a phone interview Tuesday night. “That pretty much has happened now. The water is pretty much gone except for the low-standing areas back in our campground area. It’s pretty minimal what’s left. Now we’ve been in cleanup mode here the last 24 hours or so. We have a lot of fence repairs to make happen here over the next week or so.”
About 25 campers and motorhomes that lingered around the speedway’s campgrounds from the three-day World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series event over the weekend were trapped amid the flooding, according to Johnson. But thankfully no lives were lost and that the brunt of the damage around the facility is repairable.
“I mean, there’s stuff that’s floated to where you could never imagine,” Johnson said. “It’s about getting that back into place. That’s the big part of what we’re doing right now.”
While the upcoming Silver Dollar Nationals should go on as planned, Johnson said “the only concern” for the three-day event is the speedway’s southside campground might not be available. That’ll depend on if the “campground dries out” in time and "whether we’ll be able to use that to its fullest extent and park campers down there.”
“Our north campground is where our electrical spots are. I know that’s sold out,” Johnson said. “The south campground, right now, would be our only issue for Silver Dollar Nationals weekend. Everything else should be fully functional and ready to go. Should have two weekly shows before we get to the Silver Dollar Nationals. Other than the south campground, I’m fully confident we’ll have everything else ready to go.”
Lucas Oil Series director Rick Schwallie has had enough contact with Huset’s Speedway management that he, too, is fully confident the Silver Dollar Nationals will not only go on as scheduled, but that the event will flourish. He'd spoken with Taylor Quiring, the son of track owner Tod Quiring, who told Schwallie "that it was going to be a lot of cleanup and that they would be ready for us,” the series director said in a Tuesday phone interview. “I have confidence in them. They’re a good team. They’ve faced adversity before. … They have resources at their fingertips to help them through it.”
The only incidents Schwallie can compare the flooding at Huset’s Speedway with is that longtime series track Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park “faces floodwaters all the time but they’re usually prepared for it,” having “a move-in plan and a move-out plan.”
“Couple years ago, the water got high right before our event. And it went down right before our event,” Schwallie said. “What’s unfortunate here in this particular episode, there are people who lost a lot. They lost their motorhomes. They lost their campers. The same measure with the MedStar group. I’m friends with them on Facebook. They were there with their equipment. They lost their camper and everything that was inside. That’s the unfortunate part, what everybody is having to go through there.”
Natural disasters affecting the national Dirt Late Model schedule are ray, but May 2019’s Show-Me 100 at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., is perhaps the most extreme case. A tornado that struck the Monday heading into race week forced the event's postponement.
“So, there have been a couple examples along the way that have happened,” Schwallie said. “It’s truly unfortunate when they do, but things do happen.”
Some areas of South Dakota faced double-digit rainfall and other dirt tracks in the region faced flooding. Interstate Speedway and Park Jefferson Speedway, both in Jefferson S.D., Rapid Speedway in Rock Rapids, Iowa, are among other racetracks to suffer from significant flooding.
The three tracks combine for three July races on the upcoming Repairable Vehicles.com Tri-State Series schedule, which also has July 17-18 races at Huset’s Speedway as part of the busy Silver Dollar Nationals week. Tri-State Series director Mike Gross said July 7’s date at Interstate Speedway will be postponed while decisions around July 11 at Park Jefferson Speedway and July 12 at Rapid Speedway will made later this week.
“The pictures I’ve seen from Rock Rapids, the currents actually tore up some concrete outside the grandstands,” Gross said. “Not sure how stable the grandstands are, but that’s got to be a factor on how they move forward as well.
“A lot of the small towns around here are going to take some time to return to normal, too. Like Spencer, Iowa, that down there is flooded. The whole town is flooded. There’s a lot of racing communities that were involved with this. And I’m sure there are a lot of other racetracks that I’m not even aware of that were involved as well.”
Johnson, who took over as Huset’s Speedway general manager during the 2020 season, said the recent floods are some of the most significant he’s seen in his lifetime and even compares it to Huset’s Speedway major flood from 1993.
“I’ve lived out here most of my life and I’ve seen pictures from 1993,” Johnson said. “I’d say that was one of the worst floods they’ve ever had. I would say this is as deep and severe as that one was back in ’93, just looking at old photos and stuff that like.”
