Idaho Track Joins NASCAR Whelen All-American Series
Dylan Kane’s mind is filled with childhood memories of watching races at Stateline Speedway. He grew up going with his dad to the track that’s only 10 minutes from his Idaho home.
“Just something that started on the weekends, we’d go here and there,” Kane said. “I was young, young. I remember going out there on weekends and falling asleep at the track and fell in love with it.”
Kane’s father passed away in 2009, and Kane started racing at his home track right after.
This summer will be Kane’s 10th at Stateline, a quarter-mile banked oval track built in 1974 in Kootenai County, Idaho. Last summer was his first away from his home track when he ran in the Northwest Mini Stock Tour, traveling around Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
But this summer he’ll be back home, and the announcement the track would be going NASCAR sanctioned this summer is the reason why.
Stateline made the announcement it will be part of the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series for the 2019 racing season last week at its membership meeting. Kane and other drivers didn’t know what to expect after just hearing there would be an announcement. He hadn’t heard ahead of time what we coming.
“Everyone was like ‘what’s this announcement? Are they changing something? Are they selling it? What’s going on?” he said. “And I see a guy sitting in the background and he’s got a NASCAR T-shirt and a visor on and I’m like ‘holy cow.’
“You see all these other tracks, you see them on TV with K&N East and West and all these big circuits they go to and you never think small town Idaho or Spokane, Washington is going to have anything like this. So it’s kind of unreal.”
Stateline is located in Post Falls, Idaho, a town with a population of about 33,000, just outside of Spokane, Washington.
Kane, now 26, will run a full-time schedule in Stateline’s Division IV mini stock division. While he said the original idea was to return to the Northwest tour, he wants to see the perks NASCAR will bring to Idaho. He thinks having the NASCAR name will help with advertising and getting sponsors.
“As far as a fan base locally, I think it’s going to draw a much larger crowd, I think it’s going to be a lot more efficient racing, I think the structure behind it is going to be better and I think it’s going to bring a lot to the table for Stateline,” he said. “As a track, as a family, it’s going to be a big deal for everybody involved across the board. Your local drivers, your traveling drivers.
“I think it’s going to be easier. If you tell them you run for a NASCAR-sanctioned track, under NASCAR as a division, I think it puts it in a different bracket than just a local racetrack with 4-cylinders or super lates or modifieds. I think it’s just going to bring a lot more out to it for your local drivers and crew and everybody involved.”
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Returning to his home track also brings added comfort to Kane. It’s where he learned to drive and has spent nearly a decade perfecting his skills and getting comfortable with his crew enough to be able to move on to bigger tracks and series. He’s learned a lot in his time at Stateline.
“You learn that there’s a lot more to it than a guy getting in a car and going left,” he said. “I’ve learned that you have to have a lot of trust in your spotters, your crew chiefs, your set up guys have got to be with you 100 percent, and you’ve got to be 100 percent getting into it.
“I think what I’ve learned most is probably patience really. Not going out and winning it the first time. You’re not going to go out and set the place on fire. You have to learn the ropes and learn who you’re running with and how your crew handles things, different situations, different tracks, and you’ve all got to come together and make it as a group. When you win it’s a team, or we, not just me or I. Everybody is in it 100 percent.”
Kane believes the track is going NASCAR to make the racing better for the drivers and make them feel appreciated.
For him and his team, they appreciate the chance to come back home and try to run for a championship on their own turf.
“We’ve ran different tracks and come together a lot more as a crew between the traveling and different setups and things like that, he said. “So I think this year our main focus is to go out for a championship and try and do as well as we can in that NASCAR division and see if we can take it somewhere else, to another track and just play around with it and have fun.”
Stateline Speedway will open the season on April 20.
