[Doug E]

Here's an interesting article from a paper back home in NJ that my Dad sent me and I thought us track heads might find it interesting:

New Jersey developer's Virginia motorsports complex drives economic model
for Millville.
Sunday, July 18, 2004
BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff
DANVILLE, Va. -- People who lived here all their lives felt like this
hard-luck city would never catch a break.

During the 1970s and 1980s the textile companies took nearly 9,000 jobs
from the once-prosperous Dan River Mills and sent them to Latin America
and Asia. Then the U.S. government declared war on big tobacco. That
forced the city's tobacco refining plants to start cutting jobs.

The economic fate of this city of 50,000, tucked into the southwest corner
of the state, didn't look bright.

But New Jersey developer Harvey Siegel saw gold hidden in the hills a
dozen miles east of downtown. Siegel, a sports car fanatic, found his
calling when he decided to revive the Virginia International Raceway,
known as VIR.

The picturesque 3.27 mile road-course cut into the rolling countryside
closed in 1974 after a 18-year run as one of the country's top motorsports
facilities. Thirty years later, VIR has raised the hopes of a sad town.

Since VIR re-opened in 2000, this city has added six hotels. Its
restaurants are packed on the weekends with race car drivers and fans of
everything from motorcycles to vintage auto shows. They savor the racing
world beyond the weekly Nascar Nextel Cup showdowns. They come to
experience what Siegel calls a "motorsports country club" and pump roughly
$3 million each year into the city's economy.

"We were losing our tobacco jobs, our textile jobs, everything was
leaving," Scott Bennett, owner of a funeral home and a lifelong resident,
said as he sipped a beer at the packed Gaslight Grille last Friday night.
"I love that track. It's a blessing for this city."

Siegel's track record with VIR caught the attention of leaders in
Millville, in New Jersey's Cumberland County. Nearly 400 miles north of
VIR is a city that has suffered from the same economic trends, and
officials there are betting Siegel's next world class race course can help
revive a former industrial powerhouse.

Siegel's plans call for a $100 million VIR on 700 acres next to the
Cumberland County airport. Thunderbolt Raceway at New Jersey Motorsports
Park would be part-county park, part-playground-for-the-rich, and lure a
growing niche of the motorsports world few New Jerseyans are familiar
with.

"The city fathers understand this is a different kind of place and
racing," Gary Wodlinger, a lawyer for the proposed Millville track, said
last weekend as he leaned on a fence at VIR and watched a dozen vintage
Porsches roar down the straightaway. "You look around this place and you
just know what kind of success it can have where we are."

If there are any doubts, Siegel stands ready to put them to rest.


THE MOGUL AND THE RACETRACK


Siegel was your basic bored millionaire.

The spunky, Califon resident whose overgrown, white-gray hairdo always
looks like it has just emerged from a convertible, built the Mercer Mall
in West Windsor and many other shopping centers during his career, but at
64 he couldn't bear to look at another proposal for a triple-net lease.

"Who wants to build another K-Mart?" Siegel, now 69, said as he drove a
red pickup through VIR a week ago.

A successful amateur racer, Siegel wanted to build his own track. And that
is why he found himself in southwestern Virginia on a muddy fall day in
1998. He expected a fruitless trip to a track he'd driven on during the
1960s but had almost disappeared since its closing in 1974.

Back then, motorsports were hardly the focal point of corporate commerce
they are now. Ask anyone here about VIR in the 1970s, and they will tell
you about the hippies who turned the place into a post-Woodstock haven for
drugs and free love.

"I remember being about 9 years old and watching them all get naked over
there in that pond," Bennett, the funeral director, said with a boyish
grin.

Tired of policing counterculture, the family that owned VIR turned it into
a grazing area for cattle.

Which is about what the place looked like when Siegel hiked through the
muddy clay that fall morning in 1998.

The sheer beauty of the landscape struck Siegel like the jolt of power
from a V-8 racing engine. He viewed the potholed, road-course from a hill
where a hairpin turn curls around an 60-foot oak tree.

"So I wouldn't blow the deal, all I said was, 'I might be able to work
with this,'" he said.

A year and half later he had spent roughly $10 million to resurface and
widen the race course. He built barnhouse-style concession stands, and
created a shaded paddock so drivers wouldn't bake in the southern sun in
the middle of a race. Since then he has added bathrooms and showers to the
campground area, and restored an 1840 plantation mansion on the property,
turning it into a members-only clubhouse.

He also built timing towers, VIP lounges, private dining rooms, a store, a
grand three-lane roadway entrance, a motorsports industrial park, and a
vintage car gallery, where a rare, 1956 Mercedes Gull Wing retails for
$400,000. Later this summer, he will open an exclusive, 30-room,
track-side hotel, The Lodge at VIR.

"I'm a gearhead, so I built a resort for everything with wheels" Siegel
said as he whipped his pickup truck around the property. He shrugged his
shoulders and flared his eyebrows. "Sure beats building shopping centers."


THE DRIVERS


No one is happier that Siegel left the shopping-center business than the
people who race their cars and motorcycles at VIR.

Eight weekends each year those drivers are professional racers eager to
navigate what has quickly become the East Coast's top road course other
than New York's Watkins Glen. Crowds range from a few thousand for a
regional race, to nearly 40,000 for the American Motorcycle Racing Suzuki
Lightning Nationals.

On most other weekends, the track is filled with amateurs, but they are
amateurs with money who make up the backbone of the multibillion
motorsports industry, which has an estimated fan base approaching 75
million.

Sometimes they come for a few days of performance driving school.
Sometimes they are members of their regional sportscar club, such as the
Ferrari, BMW or the Porsche club, all of which rent out VIR each year for
a weekend of racing and parties.

Last weekend, VIR hosted the Historic Sports Car Racing Association for
three days of races among 140 well-off contractors, retired airline
pilots, and executives. Their favored hobby involves spending tens of
thousands of dollars each year restoring vintage cars and traveling the
country to race. Some vintage car weekends have as many as 300 cars
entered. Pittsburgh's Vintage Grand Prix attracts some 300,000 spectators
during nine days.

One of those vintage racers was Laurie Banks of Park City, Utah, a
48-year-old flight attendant and ski instructor with shoulder-length blond
hair and a sturdy physique. Banks had little interest in cars 10 years
ago. Then her husband, Richard, came back from a week of auto racing
school she had given him for his 50th birthday.

"I hated the smell of cars, I hated the gas, I hated the noise,
everything," she said. "But Richard begged me to go to driving school, and
I was hooked."

The couple first spent $10,000 restoring an old Datsun. Then they got
serious and spent two years and $65,000 to restore their 1967
fire-engine-red Porsche 911S. Now they have a $25,000 annual budget to
cover the six-races they participate in each year.

"I've played competitive tennis, skied, and this is far and away the most
demanding sport I've ever done," Banks said as she prepared to tackle VIR
at nearly 130 miles per hour in the blistering afternoon sun. "You've got
to be fit, sharp, focused. There is just nothing like it.

Minutes later Banks pulled on a white racing suit with red pinstripes,
matching red racing boots, blue and black gloves and a red helmet, and
ducked into a seat with "RaceGirl" stitched into the fabric. Her fingers
squeezed the steering wheel as a few labored breaths escaped from her
lungs. The engine revved and Banks cruised to the starting line.

A half-hour later, Banks pulled her helmet off, and unzipped her racing
suit, her face and the skin on her chest as beet-red as her car. As she
pulled off her gloves to reveal a perfect French manicure, she said she
wasn't scared tearing around 160-degree turns with other cars mere feet
behind her.

"Out on the freeway," she said. "That's where I get scared."


Danville's Boomlet, Millville's Hope


The restaurant attached to the Comfort Inn isn't supposed to be the
hottest joint in town. But David Neal's Gaslight Grille has become just
that since opening in 2001.

Neal grew up here but spent most of his adult life working as an executive
chef in North and South Carolina because he didn't think his hometown
could support the high quality, Creole-style restaurant and bar he wanted
to open. Then he got a call from an acquaintance trying to fill the space
at the Comfort Inn.

"Wait until about 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m.," Neal tells a visitor just after
9 p.m. on a recent Friday night. "I promise you, we'll be packed."

By 10:45 p.m., the prediction has come true, and by the end of the night
as many as 500 customers, about half of them VIR visitors, have come
through the doors to eat, drink, and hear the live, roots music.

"The estimate is VIR pumps about $3 million into the region's economy, and
that's a lot of money around here," Chuck Vipperman, the local radio
station's news director said on Saturday afternoon as he took in the races
from a canvas lounge chair with a cooler of soda and beer at his feet.

That is not to say VIR has totally turned around the fate of this city,
which is still proud to have served as the capital of the Confederacy
after Richmond burned.

Plenty of storefronts downtown remain empty. By the river, empty
warehouses and factory buildings stretch for blocks. Unemployment in the
region hovers around 10 percent to 12 percent, and figures to get worse.
Dan River Mills filed for federal bankruptcy protection three months ago,
and layoffs are expected at a plant that has seen employment fall
three-fourths to 3,000 in recent years. Dimon Tobacco recently downsized
another 500 employees.

But across the Dan River on the east side of town, Marriott, Holiday Inn,
Comfort Inn, Sleep Inn and other major chains have opened for business and
often fill up during VIR's 40 event weekends. The restaurant chains, such
as Ruby Tuesday's, Texas Style Steakhouse, and Applebee's, have half-hour
waits on Fridays and Saturdays.

It's a dynamic Millville is hoping to capture.

"I've been making the point for years: The motorsports fan spends money,
and corporate America knows it," said Donald Fauerbach, the Millville
resident who has spearheaded Cumberland County's efforts to land a
racetrack. Siegel and his partners plan to spend roughly $85 million on
the first phase of the project, which includes the track, a country club
and a hotel.

Not everyone is in favor of Millville's plan.

Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, said
the proposed site for the track next to the airport is a haven for several
endangered grassland bird species and amphibians that could be harmed from
gas and oil runoff.

"You've got water pollution as well as air and noise from the fumes and
the engines," Tittel said. "I don't have a problem with the project, but
the location is wrong."

Not so, according to Fauerbach, who said environmental tests will show the
facility will not harm endangered species and will give his city the
destination it yearns for.

"Every governor I've known supports this project, but they wanted us to
find a private developer who knows the racing business and has had
experience with this elsewhere," Fauerbach said. "Harvey Siegel fits that
description."

[BW911]

Thanks for passing that along, Doug. Interesting piece.

Bill

[rs911t]

Interesting read. Thanks!

Most of you probably saw this on Pelican. If not, this site has lots of pictures taken at VIR in its early heyday. Cool stuff.



Can't wait to get back! [/img]

[cmartin]

Great stuff guys!

Love the photo Greg.