RACETRACK REVIEWS
2 Tracks 2 days Part 2, Mid America Motorplex
Author: Bill Pelfrey
Field of Dreams?
Maintaining your sense of dignity while walking away can be challenging. Especially when you know you may very well have made a fool of yourself in a public setting. But often, the worthiness of the ‘prize’ offsets the dignity deficit and renders the fool ready to try again with nary a scratch to his armor—er, leathers. And so it was for me as I loaded up the trailer and headed out of Motorsports Park Hastings (MPH) that Saturday after Day 1 of the “Two Days, Two Tracks, $222 bucks” event hosted by TrackAddix. Head held high, ego bruised, but willing and anxious to come back and ride another day. (Editor’s note: check out last month’s article for the prequel!)
Interstate 80 runs the width of Nebraska and has inspired countless metaphors about boredom and exactly one Springsteen song about a mass murderer. While I have had the privilege of traversing it end-to-end on multiple occasions, I was thankful on that evening that I only had a two and a half hour trip east to the Omaha area for the second half of the TrackAddix double header at Mid America Motorplex (MAM for short) on Sunday. I normally don’t mind a long drive through endless prairie, but on this trip I was more interested in the goal than the journey. And MAM was definitely the goal.
The track was built in 2002 just south of Omaha on I-29 along the Nebraska-Iowa border. It is a 2.2 mile 15-turn circuit plunked smack dab in the middle of a cornfield and designed, like many new tracks, by Alan Wilson and company. To say that it has enticed me in the past is an understatement. “Tortured,” is perhaps a better word. It is only a few miles from where my in-laws live, so over the years I have driven by it dozens of times, often under the guise of ‘running errands.’ Each visit was exactly the same: not a soul in sight, not a sound to be heard other than the rumble of a tractor in the adjacent fields. Actually, this was perfect, in that it gave me a clean slate to enact my fantasy of finally getting back on the track again. That MAM didn’t have the epic feel of a Barber or Laguna Seca mattered little. It was a racetrack, in Iowa no less, and was a constant reminder that even people in Iowa were having more fun than me.
I’ll admit it. MPH was still on my mind as I entered the gates. But the memory of that other track drifted further and further away as I attempted to traverse the remains of the MAM paddock area and find a spot of asphalt that didn’t look like it had been the target of a training mission from the nearby headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. Amazingly, the initial juxtaposition of the two tracks did little to dampen my enthusiasm. In fact, it may have done the opposite. There’s nothing like a change of venue to recharge the batteries. But as I looked beyond the paddock area, similarities began to emerge. The track has a wide open feel, similar to Hastings, with a no elevation changes, excellent visibility and run-off areas that blended seamlessly into a sea of green. I was starting to get excited. I was in Iowa, after all. Could this be my Field of Dreams?
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