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If we were dealing in cliches, I could use the tired, trite old line of it being “deja vu, all over again.” Of course, that once-humorous redundancy was once-humorous, but no longer reaches that level. Besides, going to Brainerd International Raceway last weekend to watch some road-racing was more like the opposite of deja vu; more like something you’ve never experienced before.

My history at BIR goes back to its opening Donnybrooke Speedway days, when the late George Montgomery – a retired Northwest Airlines pilot who never got high speed out of his system – built a 3-mile road course in the wooded area six miles north of Brainerd, on the way to Nisswa, Breezy Point, Grandview Lodge, and other assorted resorts.

In fact, I claim the first full lap around the high-speed course one day just before they paved the circuit, when I was driving a 1968 Volvo 142 S, dark green with a 4-speed stick and electric overdrive, up to Bemidji to write about a national collegiate golf tournament for the Minneapolis Tribune. I spent most of my time covering hockey all winter and auto racing all summer for the Tribune, so when I drove past this obvious construction site, I made an abrupt turn, thinking “This must be where they’re building this road-racing track.”

Bingo! I drove around the site, looking for someone, anyone, to quiz about the place. Nobody was there. Not a soul. After searching for a while, I thought, OK – here goes. And I drove that dark green 1968 Volvo out on the well-graded track and drove a nice, neat lap around the place, down the mile-long straightaway, feeling the banking in Turn 1, and the tightening sequence of Turns 2, 3, 4-5-6, the 7-8 chicane, the sweeping Turn 9, and the dished Turn 10. Then I pulled off, got back onto Hwy. 371 northbound, and, a few hours later, covered the golf tournament.

Those were the good-old days, when motorsports was thriving in Minnesota. At the Minneapolis Tribune, I’d cover the “Tri-Circuit” of asphalt oval stock cars at Twin City Speedway on Fridays, Elko Speedway on Saturday nights, and Raceway Park on Sundays. Sometimes I’d hit Minnesota Dragways for any show bigger than the weekly bracket-racing on a weekend, and maybe the adjacent dragstrip at Twin City. It was fun helping push the Tribune to leading-edge status in race coverage, writing about all the events at the fledgling Donnybrooke when it opened in 1968, and going off to the Indianapolis 500, and to Elkhart Lake for June Sprints, Trans-Am, and the huge Can-Am circus events.
Donnybrooke was so named as a clever tribute to Donny Skogmo and Brooke Kinnard, SCCA road-racers who both were killed in racing crashes. Montgomery was able to bring in some road races, and landed a coup when SCCA was slow to accept the track for its pro road races by bringing in Indy cars, driven by Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Bobby and Al Unser and other big names from the Indy 500. It wasn’t difficult after that for SCCA to be eager to bring the Trans-Am and Formula 5000 to Donnybrooke, but the huge and costly Can-Am was another issue.

A marketing fellow at the Minneapolis Tribune was caught up in it all, and pushed the right buttons to get the paper to sponsor The Tribune Can-Am in 1970, for the first two trips the world’s only unlimited-engine road-racing drivers made to Minnesota. Team McLaren, with Bruce McLaren and Denis Hulme dominating in their Gulf-orange McLaren race cars, plus Peter Revson, and others, raced against Jim Hall’s Chaparral, Jackie Stewart in the Lola, and all sorts of other world-reknown drivers.

Bruce McLaren, tragically, was killed in a test crash of his new Formula 1 car, so he never made it to Brainerd. But the rest of the superstars showed up and raced. The Tribune Can-Am came again in 1971, then got priced out of reach.

But it was the Trans-Am that held the most allure for car nuts, because those were actual factory-backed production Mustangs, Camaros, Challengers, Barracudas, and Javelins, driven by Mark Donohue, Parnelli Jones, George Follmer, Swede Savage, Dan Gurney, Sam Posey and other luminaries of the sport. They ran an accompanying “Under 2.5” series, for cars with 4-cylinder engines, with John Morton’s Datsun 510 putting on incredible duels with Horst Kwech’s Alfa Romeo coupe – sometimes stealing the spotlight from the 5-liter Ponycars.

The open-wheeled Formula 5000 cars also were limited to 5-liter V8s, but while the racing was good, it lacked the panache of the Trans-Am or the brute force of those bellowing, 7-liter Can-Am cars.
That 3-mile circuit with its mile-long straightaway was a wonderful playpen for the Can-Am cars, and it was a unique challenge for the Trans-Ams, because if you geared for top speed on the long straightaway, you might find yourself out of sorts – and real estate – when you got to the twisty turns. To win, you had to master both, or juggle the compromises just right.

The drivers had to hurry around that Donnybrooke Speedway track, and the fans had to hurry just as well. U.S. automakers found a way to foul up the golden goose known as Trans-Am by making their cars bigger, and with larger engines. So the best cars remained the “old” 1969 and 1970 models. Interest faded, money and sponsorship left, and so did the top drivers.
Track owner George Montgomery knew how difficult it was to come up with sponsors and race programs, but it had taken me a year or two to convince George to try drag racing. He hated the idea, thinking they were primitive types who couldn’t turn corners. I suggested that instead of coming up with sponsors for $100,000 purses for road races, he could offer a 10-cent plastic trophy and all sorts of hot-rodder would show up and pay entry fees to drag-race for bracket superiority.

Finally, George gave in, and in a matter of a few years, the National Hot Rod Association drag races became the track’s top money-maker, with Top Fuel, Funny Car and Pro Stocks leading the way down that ideal mile-long straightaway.

Times change. The track went under from financial problems, and poor George died, heartbroken that his dream was shattered. The track closed in 1972 , although a year later, road racer extraordinaire Jerry Hansen plucked the track out of bankruptcy and renamed it Brainerd International Raceway. With Hansen’s good buddy Dick Roe as manager, BIR was resurrected and enjoyed some more popular years, even though the big NHRA meet carried the place, as the Can-Am was a shell of its old self, and the Trans-Am and amateur racers tried to stay competitive.

A couple more owners came and went, and the fortunes of BIR slid down a long slope until Jed Copham took over the place and infused a new attitude and new life. He carried out an idea Roe and others had promoted, to build a smaller, tighter 2.5-mile road course inside the big track – eliminating the long straight, while weaving through the infield, going on the big track at Turn 1 and going through Turn 8 before cutting back inside. It’s now a 13-turn track.

SCCA rescheduled the new and revised Trans-Am series from Labor Day to run last Sunday, in conjunction with the 29th Show and Go. They ran on the new 2.5-mile course, while amateur muscle cars drag raced on the adjacent straightaway.

Things were a bit confusing, because the Trans-Am is now run in three groups, with the most modified Corvettes and Mustangs and Camaros running in Trans-Am 1, while less-modified but similar cars run in Trans-Am 2, and more stock versions make up Trans-Am 3. Normally they run in separate races, and it was approaching mass confusion when they all ran together and a lengthy caution slowdown bunched them together.

There was no press room, no compilation of race winners for media consumption, and no really good place to watch the races from and/or shoot photos. None of the state’s major newspapers bothered to cover it. But it didn’t matter. It was hot, 95 degrees, and the racing was hotter.  No, those weren’t 1970 Mustangs, Camaros and Challengers with 5-liter V8s, but there was intense competition all around the course. Ol’ George Montgomery would have loved it.

Archer On Target, Settles for 2nd in Trans-Am

Tommy Archer’s return to road-racing was a qualified success last Sunday. That’s different from an “unqualified” success, because Archer didn’t win the Trans-Am 2 event around Brainerd International Raceway’s new 2.5-mile infield layout -- he just dominated the 40-lap race.
His fierce battle for the lead was the highlight of the day, although all three classes had their moments, but a careless move by a novice driver sent Archer into a wild spin in the closing laps, and when the dust cleared, Archer wound up second to Dillon Machavern’s Mustang.

Never shy about exhibiting his considerable driving skill, Archer immediately knew he was going for a spin, so he executed a full 360-degree spin and came out of it heading the right direction. He immediately set out in hot pursuit of Gar Robinson, who had gotten past in the chaos, and he chased him down and made a dramatic pass in heavy congestion with two laps to go.

Machavern, however, had squeezed past both of them in the congestion, and he was able to hold off Archer to be first to the checkered flag.

Archer, a veteran racer from Duluth who has spent the last couple of years battling successfully against a couple of cancer situations, unveiled his new Camaro in style by winning the pole position with a strong qualifying bid on Saturday. Then he set off to take the lead in his segment, and increase it by enough that he was passing cars in the alleged faster group ahead.

Because the number of cars was slightly down for the race, SCCA decided to group all three into one race, which made for a little mass confusion that was not attributable to the sizzling 95-degree temperature outside.

“I had built up about an 8 or 9-second lead,” Archer said. “And I had gone by two cars from the faster group ahead. But a car had gone off the track inside Turn 5, and was off in the grass. Different tracks handle that sort of thing differently. He was out of the way, so we could have kept racing, but they decided they’d rather pull the car out of there and get it off the track.”

To do that meant a yellow caution flag slowed all the cars from all three classes and allow no passing. Bunched up tightly in single file, Archer was still leading his segment, although the 20-year-old Machavern and Robinson both closed up right behind him. When the track was finally clear, four or five laps later, the green flag waved.

“On the restart, cars were going four-wide into turns,” Archer said. “There was a father and son team driving two cars, and I passed the dad, and then the son. I passed him going into a turn, and I was going about 15 miles per hour faster than he was. I came across in front of him, left to right, and he came into the turn too hard, and hit me on the right rear and spun me out of the lead.

“I asked him later what he had done, and he said he thought he had the line. I told him he did, but I had gone past him and was clear, and he just drove into me. He admitted he might have made a mistake.”
 There followed several laps of fantastic racing, as Archer’s No. 54 Camaro strained to pass Robinson. He finally got past him, but he couldn’t reel in Machavern’s Mustang.

It didn’t help that the first thing to go wrong was Archer’s radio went out right at the start, so he could never hear reports from his crew. “The guys were giving me splits, but I couldn’t hear the radio,” he said.

“But I’m not dissatisfied. Our first time out with a brand new car, we won the pole, led the race, and after we dropped to third in congestion, we came back and got second place. It’ll be a whole different show in the next race, at Mid-Ohio, because there’ll be more cars and we’ll be running Trans-Am 2 as a separate race.”

Up ahead, in the stronger Trans-Am 1, Doug Peterson’s bright yellow Corvette had the overall race lead, but the No. 88 Corvette moved up to challenge, and made an electrifying pass going into Turn 5 midway through the race. Coming out of the left-hand Turn 4, the No. 88 car swung toward the outside, and when Peterson veered left for the racing line, and also to effectively block, the No. 88 instantly darted to the right, taking the line going into the right-hand Turn 5, and had the lead the rest of the way. The driver of the No. 88 was Amy Ruman, who won her third Trans-Am 1 of the season in the sixth race. Cliff Ebben also got past Peterson and took second.

In the slower, more stock Trans-Am 3, Cindy Lux won one segment in a Viper, and Jason Fichter won the American Muscle segment.

It was a hot day for racing, and the action will look good on CBS-Sports when the BIR Trans-Am will be replayed July 25.