Resurfaced Earlville Track Primed for Lucas Oil Event

Resurfaced Earlville Track Primed for Lucas Oil Event

Reid Kuhlman doesn't mess around. When he built Tri-State Raceway, he didn't just put in a concrete launch pad or lay concrete to the 330-foot mark or to half-track or even for the entire quarter-mile – he did it from behind the water box to the last turnoff.

When Kuhlman recently had the surface ground and polished, he started at the 150-foot-mark and went all the way to the finish line. "Diamond grinding leaves longitudinal ridges," he explained. "Those can take a while to fill in with rubber, so after we had the track ground, we had it polished for eight days until everything was perfectly smooth."

Now the groove is wider, longer, flatter, and smoother than it's ever been. "The Top Dragsters have already been in the low 6s at more than 220 mph, the Top Sportsman cars are flying, everybody's computers are showing how smooth the surface is, and everybody's saying they can't feel even a little bump anywhere in either lane," said Kuhlman, who's gearing up for a record-breaking event when Tri-State hosts its Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series Central Regional the week after the U.S. Nationals.

"The Alcohol Dragster track record is 5.32, and the Alcohol Funny Car record is 5.62, and we don't expect either one of them to last past that weekend," said Kuhlman, whose facility holds the Division 5 car-count record (more than 600) and once held nearly 20 cars just in Top Alcohol Funny Car. "We pick up a lot of teams that stop here on their way back to the West Coast after Indy and a lot of top cars from all around the country, and we're hoping a bunch of them will be back again this year with all the guys from Division 5 and Division 3."

For some reason, alcohol racing's biggest stars typically don't shine when the Lucas Oil tour hits the tiny town of Earlville, Iowa (population: 800), a half-hour west of Dubuque in the northeast part of the state, where Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois come together. Edwin Schmeeckle, Richard Putz, Dave Heitzman, Gord Gingles, and Sidnei Frigo have scored there in Top Alcohol Dragster, Schmeeckle and Putz more than once. Top Alcohol Funny Car has been dominated by Kirk Williams and Andy Bohl, who each have multiple wins, and the defending event champs are Jared Dreher, who also scored this weekend at St. Louis in Alcohol Dragster, and Williams in Alcohol Funny Car.

In addition to having the surface painstaking polished after it was reground, the 4,000-foot track, now in its 17th year, has his own tire rotator to keep the rubber in top condition. But instead of buying one for more than $50,000, Kuhlman, your typical hardworking, can-do Midwesterner, built his own.

"Our tire rotator is a little different than the other ones out there," said Kuhlman, who used to own a company that built 200,000-pound rock crushers. "The slicks aren't all in a row on this one. It's a two-axle machine and the tires are staggered. With the slicks offset like that, you can stay out of the groove you just did when you're coming back in the opposite direction, and it has its own air compressor right on it. All the tires are hooked up to a regulator and kept at the exact right pressure at all times.

"The right lane used to have a little bump just past half-track, and the left lane had one that was a little bigger, but the left was always the preferred lane," Kuhlman said. "This was never a one-lane track or anything – there's nothing worse than that – but now the whole track is smooth as glass. Running a race track is like running anything else – you're either in or you're out – so we just stepped up and said, 'OK, let's do it. Let's go all out.' Nothing in this business is cheap, so what's it going to be? In the past, people would come here and say that they had better 60-foot times than they just had at Indy, and now all the bumps are gone. This should be our best race ever – now this place really has some teeth."