Sport's 'ultimate success story' is New Hampshire (cont'd)

"I moved to New England in the early '80s to further my career, because particularly at that time, if you wanted to race modifieds, this was the part of the country to do it in," said Bodine, a native of Chemung, N.Y., who now serves as NASCAR's director of cost research. "That's why I came to [tracks like] Stafford and Thompson and Riverside Park. This is where the competition was, the biggest crowds, the best following of modifieds was in the Northeast. And I knew if those folks ever got a taste of Cup racing, what it would mean. The ultimate success story is this race track being here in New Hampshire."

“

I think maybe the thing that threw people off a little was just NASCAR stock-car racing in the Northeast. This has always been a huge group of racing fans up in the Northeast.

”

-- JEFF GORDON

A foundation was already in place. NASCAR's modified tour -- which has its strongest foothold in the Northeast, and competes as an undercard to the Sprint Cup circuit only in New Hampshire -- is the sport's oldest division. Before he razed the old Bryar Motorsports Park to build his Granite State race track, Bahre promoted an annual late model event at Maine's Oxford Plains Speedway that attracted sellout crowds and the occasional NASCAR star. Richard Petty won one of the three premier-division events held on that same .333-mile paved oval in the 1960s, and knew the fans were there. The King wasn't surprised when the Cup tour played to a full house in its first visit to New Hampshire in 1993.

"When we came up here for this particular race, we'd already come up here before," Petty said. "We went to Oxford, Maine, in the '60s. So we've run all over this territory. And in seeing and talking to fans, there were fans everywhere up here. They'd wander out of Canada, wander off the islands and stuff, there were just a lot of fans here. When Bob and them built the race track, they knew there were fans here. You build it, they will come. They knew that. So we knew we would get a very good reception with the Cup Series being here, because it was the first time we'd had a big, big race up here."

Even so, a Cup date was far from guaranteed; in fact, Bahre built the track without any assurances that he'd ever get one. Requests to France were answered with the same "slim to none" refrain. Bahre had to be satisfied with a pair of events in the then-Busch series, which attracted crowds larger than most expected. Jeff Gordon, who had done some developmental-circuit racing in the Northeast prior to his NASCAR days, wasn't surprised.

"I think maybe the thing that threw people off a little was just NASCAR stock-car racing in the Northeast," he said. "This has always been a huge group of racing fans up in the Northeast. I raced up here briefly long before I ever went down South to get involved with NASCAR. I was driving a midget, a super modified, and saw the different tracks and the competition and a huge fan base for local racing. I wasn't that surprised. You put a flat one-mile oval track near Loudon, N.H., I wasn't sure how big it could be. After the first [Busch] race that I ran here and saw the grandstand filled up, I knew the Cup Series would do very well here."

But for the time being, "slim and none" continued to ring in Bahre's ears. The track hosted two Busch events again in 1991, and two more in 1992, each of them accompanied by the usual array of modified and late model support races. Brian France, spearheading the effort to make NASCAR a more national series, eventually came up to visit. He left impressed, and next time brought his father up with him. Bill Jr. was impressed, too. At last, he telephoned Bahre to tell him that New Hampshire would receive a Cup date for 1993. Bahre, unassuming as always, dryly acted as if the caller had reached the wrong number. (Continued)