Some Kind of Family
A few miles from the quiet shops of gentrified Portland is another world — the burnt rubber, gasoline-infused, screaming-engines universe of small-time auto racing. And the man at its center, who makes it a home.
When the driver jumps out six thousand fans suck in their breath. No one gets out of their car unless they’ve won — or unless something’s wrong. The station wagon, a ’99 red-and-blue Audi A4 with “Battle Wagon” stenciled across the front window, has been blasting away at the competition all night in a series of one-lap sprints, with $500 in prize money on the line. But as the wagon lines up for the final race around the third-of-a-mile oval track, thick white smoke is pouring from under its hood.
So when the driver, Steve Delage, a stocky twenty-five-year-old with a shaved head and red beard, examines his smoking car, he looks as though he’s going to congratulate the other driver, wave to the fans, and forfeit. He slides down to look under the smoldering Audi, gets up, smiles, and talks briefly with the flagman. He walks around to his competition, a light blue Subaru WRX, and chats with the other driver, as though there aren’t thousands of people watching. Then, through the smoke, he walks back to his ratty Audi as if the holdup never happened, juices the engine, and drops the car into gear, the muffler crackling.
When fans in the grandstands realize the race is still on, they start pumping fists in the air. Both cars bump forward a bit, brake lights blinking in the haze before holding solid red, front wheels barely touching the start line, revs held high — both drivers itching for that green flag to drop before dumping the clutch and redlining all the way to that shiny trophy.
On this early fall Friday in 2014, Beech Ridge Motor Speedway in Scarborough, Maine has sold out its 4,500-seat grandstand for an event called Day of Destruction, a series of races where baby-toting families cheer on amateur drivers drag-racing or crashing up “smashers.” They’ve been coming for more than sixty years, Beech Ridge is Maine’s oldest family-run racetrack. It’s a former horse racing facility still in the same spot on two-lane Holmes Road, less than eight miles southwest of Portland in the southern part of the state — one of a handful of survivors of more than thirty racetracks that once thrived in Maine.
And survival is not easy. Overseeing it all is Andy Cusack, the owner. An hour before show time he stands alone in the middle of the pits — his arms crossed, his gaze focused, scanning the track and grandstands from behind his sunglasses as if in a bubble that all the commotion can’t penetrate. The fans, racers, and track workers know to leave him alone. His steady fear that fans won’t show up, that the night won’t pull in enough money, that Beech Ridge will fail — pushes him to drive the track as hard as the racers drive their cars.
Though he runs what he calls an “adrenaline-based” business, Andy appears calm and composed. Fifty years old — lean, tan, and tall, with short black hair and a strong jaw — he projects a crisp efficiency: Before, during, and after the races, he’s here to direct the show. The only time he looks a little startled is when you ask him about his family life. He explains, in his quiet voice, that he’s single, that he dated some in the past but that it’s difficult for someone to accept his busy life. That the track always takes up too much time and energy. That Beech Ridge comes first. That this track is his life, a kind of extended family.
“I’ve missed a lot of pool parties and weddings and family reunions,” he says. “But I’m very comfortable with that; I have a great outside social life.” He has a strong group of friends he’s known since childhood, he points out. He’s also close to his nephews, both of whom work at the track. And he says he’ll often just call up employees like his pit steward, to chat and check in about the upcoming season. His track announcer feels like a son to him, he says, and he notes that he’s surrounded by Cusacks — his brother, Glenn, doing behind-the-scenes operations; his mother, Jane, doing back-office accounting; and his dad, Ralph, doing “whatever he wants to do” — a thought that for some reason makes Andy laugh.
Beech Ridge is the kind of place that feels as though it has been here forever and will always be, a beacon. Burgers and fries. Burning rubber. Demolition Derby. Cheap beer. Racing. Smoke. Fun. It is like a carnival except with thunderous, fast moving things and towering grandstands, the seats nothing more than wide, wooden planks bolted to a truss of rusted angle iron.
Just when it seems like all of America’s sharp edges have been filed down and rounded off — with anything remotely dangerous or exciting sanitized for your protection — there’s Beech Ridge, hidden away in gritty, working-class Scarborough, with race nights loose and barely under control. Where Officer Rick Rouse of the Scarborough Police Department feels alright if he only has to throw out a couple of rowdies. The night of Day of Destruction can be as dicey and unpredictable as the racing itself.
“I like the crashes,” says April McKay, thirty-six, from Sanford, about forty minutes to the southwest. “That’s what got me hooked, the crashes,” she says, smiling but serious.
Before it all starts on race nights at Beech Ridge, there’s this feeling in the air that something’s about to happen — and that it involves speed, power, and guts, and is loud and a little scary.
In the Spectator Drags, the drivers are not professionals, the idea being that any audience member could bring their street-legal car to compete in the one-lap drag races, or “sprints,” around the track. The winner of each two-car race then goes on to the next round. Eventually, several dozen competitors are winnowed down to the two, who then race two out of three to take the trophy and the five hundred bucks.
And at this particular final round, both the smoking Audi and the rival Subaru have each won a race. In the first heat, in spite of losing the coin toss and getting the outside lane, the Audi got a good start, but the Subaru plunged ahead, holding its line on the back straight. The Audi couldn’t get around in turns three or four, pulling up hard and close before the finish line — but not close enough. The crowd cheered when the Subaru won, as both cars cruised slowly around the track and lined up again.
For the second race, the cars swapped starting positions, with the Audi on the inside. The Audi again stomped off ahead of the Subaru and managed to hold him off as they screamed around the track. Heading into turn three, the Subaru started gaining as the cars went wide, motors screaming, tires squealing, both threatening to spin out sideways. With the gas pedal pinned to the floor, the Audi stayed just barely ahead, hitting the finish line first.
And now, for the last race, Steve Delage, in the Audi, again loses the coin toss and gets the outside lane. No one ever wants the outside — it’s a longer distance around, and it’s hard to get inside once you’re out. When the flag drops, the Audi lurches and slams through the gears. With both motors winding up, the Subaru pulls beside, holding the Audi off in turns one and two, then manages to dive ahead right before the back straight, leaving the Audi hard on the Subaru’s bumper heading into turn three. The Audi bops back and forth, trying to get around. The Subaru goes a little wide, leaving the tiniest window for the Audi.
The Audi jolts, hops behind, then pulls out and dives past the Subaru — into the infield dirt area, technically not part of the track. Brown smoke blows out from the Audi’s underside as it wriggles and then slides sideways back onto the track with that weird, screeching tire sound, the rear end inches away from the Subaru and forcing it even further to the outside.
And as if by some voodoo magic, the Audi somehow straightens out. Both cars are back on the track by turn four, tires begging for grip on the asphalt, engines whining — as if they might blow at any second — the cars side by side now, heading toward the finish. But the Audi’s got the inside.
When the Audi crosses the line just inches ahead of the Subaru, the crowd’s response is staggering. Steve Delage hops out with his helmet off, the car no longer smoking, and waves to the crowd with both hands, drinking in the noise. Then he grabs the checkered flag, hops back in and screeches off for a victory lap, the black-and-white checkered flag fluttering out the driver’s side window.
Less than eight miles away, in Portland, southern Maine’s progressive, artistic city of sixty-six thousand, the scene couldn’t be more different. Here, in a crowd that gently flows up and down Congress Street during downtown’s First Friday Arts Walk, sweater-draped couples and families in neon-colored Crocs spill in and out of places like SPACE Gallery and the Portland Museum of Art. Street artists hawk landscape paintings, T-shirts, and refrigerator magnets. As the sun sets, bringing a slight season-changing chill to the air, the younger set will grab a slice at Otto’s and watch street performers in Monument Square or Congress Square Park, while older patrons head off to dinner at 555, Hugo’s, or Fore Street; the entire affair orderly and sedate.
But head down Congress Street to the outskirts of town, past the Portland International Jetport and the Maine Mall, the galleries and quaint, farm-to-table restaurants give way to places like Longhorn Steakhouse and Cracker Barrel; the handmade soap stores are replaced by Best Buy and Wal-Mart. A little further, where Payne Road turns into two-lane blacktop dipping and rising over wooded hills, locals know to take the Bridges Drive short-cut to Holmes Road, where it becomes apparent that something’s brewing. Clusters of tall, bright lights and several-stories-tall grandstands are surrounded by several dirt parking lots the size of football fields, with rows and rows and rows of parked cars in every direction, even squeezed up against the trees or wedged in the brush.
At the main ticket window to Beech Ridge Motor Speedway, they’re politely letting crestfallen stragglers know that they’re too late to sit in the grandstands, but there might be some room in the bleachers on the other side or along the back straight’s tall chain-link fence. Cramming people in those places brings the total number at the track to more than six thousand, here to watch locals whip-up on each other. It’s a sizable crowd; enough to pack the Pirates’ hockey arena or the Sea Dogs baseball stadium back in Portland.
Past the main entrance’s ticket booths, a tunnel-like walkway leads to the front of the stands, where high metal fencing surrounds the track, except for the dirt run-off areas at either end. The straightaways are bordered with a low, white concrete wall, marred by long, deep gouges. The corners are hemmed in by a row of tall, black knobby tires, retired from backhoes and pavers, buried a few feet in the dirt.
On a typical night, Beech Ridge will employ more than a hundred workers, along with a couple dozen friends and neighbors who drop by to lend a hand. Ed Walsh, a skinny, eighty-three-year-old man with short white hair, has been Beech Ridge’s flag man since 1976. “This isn’t real racing,” he says of Days of Destruction, feigning disgust and waving his hand like he’s swatting a fly. “But look at the stands,” he says, smiling and holding his arms out. “It’s a great night here.”
Nancy Butterfield says she’s worked the ticket booth for twenty-nine seasons — not years, mind you — but seasons. She has curly grey hair and sparkling eyes, and playfully refuses to reveal her age. “I just love it here,” she says. “It’s like a big family, you know?
When you ask Andy Cusack about his job title, his stern expression lifts for a moment. “Coffee-drinker,” he says, and laughs. “Nah, CEO, I guess. I do a little bit of everything — promotion, manage, coordinate with staff, do the books — stuff like that.”
Andy speaks in short sentences and quietly enough that you have to lean in. He looks at you when he starts to speak, then away, scanning everything around him, as if his mind is somewhere else. “Give ’em a good product and a good time, and they’ll come back,” Andy says, nodding towards the stands.
But it’s not easy. Andy says he can only operate a few days a week during Maine’s short summer, his family-oriented fans partial to Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, leaving a small window to make money. “What a store in the mall does in three hundred days a year, we have to do in forty,” he says. His competition isn’t other racetracks, which are hours away, but places like the Maine Mall, five minutes down the road, or nearby movie theaters, restaurants, and amusement parks.
And the weather is a huge factor. Cars can’t run in the rain, and fans won’t show up even if they think it’s going to rain. Cancelled events might get another chance, but most don’t, because of the tight schedule. And hardly anyone comes to rescheduled races held during the week.
“Rain days don’t come back,” he says, softly.
Andy has an aura that invites people near, but never too close. He’s a Cusack, after all, a member of southern Maine’s legendary racing family. Before Beech Ridge was paved in 1986, it was a dirt track where Andy’s dad, Ralph, started racing in 1949, at sixteen. Driving his famed “Blue Deuce,” Ralph won so many races and championships that locals said he “owned” the track — before he actually owned the track.
Ralph, now eighty-two, still looks boyish, in spite of tanned, rough skin, slapped with aftershave. His trim, grey hair is neatly combed. He rubs his chin and squints before looking off in the distance, like John Wayne.
Ralph talks about coming into Beech Ridge like it was a pile-up he couldn’t avoid:
“I didn’t wanna do it.”
The previous owner, he explains, had been hounding him to buy the track, even before Ralph retired from racing in 1980. “But he kept talkin’ and talkin,’ and the more he talked, the more I got thinkin’ about it.” The owner made it sound easy. Ralph snorts and shakes his head, looking down at his worn, folded hands. “He gave me that line of shit, you know, like, ‘Christ — all you do is go down there Saturday night and open the place up.’”
Down in the pits, a flat-dirt area several times larger than the track, drivers are supposed to get in by six p.m. for the seven p.m. show. But it’s common knowledge that most can’t make the deadline since they have to leave work, load up their rigs, and put down miles to reach the track. A few racers roll in from larger cities like Lewiston, Augusta, or Portland, but most come from small towns sprinkled throughout Maine, such as Sidney or Lisbon Falls, Springvale or Turner, some an hour and a half away.
The Dodge Rams and Ford F350’s rumble in with flatbed trailers hauling spray-painted cars, many with previously crunched fenders and gouged side panels. Among the scattered light poles and oil-drum trash cans wrapped in checkered black-and-white plastic covers, men in grease-stained jeans and work boots unhook chains and lower cars with winch cables. Then they pop the hoods and wrench down the lug nuts, while engines rev in a cloud of exhaust.
Travis Marcil is a bright-eyed thirty-one year-old lobsterman from Arundel, about a half-hour south of Beech Ridge. With a mustache and goatee, in baggy, faded jeans and an unbuttoned flannel shirt over a white T-shirt, he hops around, his arms gangly and loose. He sometimes whirls around to make a point. “I’ve been doin’ this for twelve years,” he says, adjusting a worn, beige ball-cap. “We come to roll ’em over and put a show on for the kids.” Travis explains that his wife and three year-old son are in the stands to watch him race, and that tonight’s fun will definitely put a dent in the family’s budget. But it’s worth it. “We love this place,” he says.
Tonight he’s brought his beige-colored pickup, but it’s difficult to decipher the make and model, since the truck is already crunched and bashed beyond recognition. “It’s a ’96 Dodge Ram 1500,” he says. “We race Thursday nights also,” meaning Thursday Thunder, a weekly event held from mid-June to mid-August, with an emphasis on actual racing as opposed to crashing, but with fewer cars and a smaller crowd.
Travis says he works eighty to ninety hours a week lobstering, but still finds time to get his truck ready. “I’ll race until I can’t climb in and out of ’em anymore,” he says.
Nearby is Nikki Clark, bouncing up and down in the cab of her ’95 primer-black Chevy S-10 pickup. “I just turned eighteen!” she shouts. The words “DADDYS GIRL” and a small heart are slathered on the sides of the truck in white paint. Nikki says she’s from Greene, an hour away, and that she’s done “a lot of hanging out” at Beech Ridge since she was younger, watching her dad race. Now that she’s old enough, she’s ready to hit the track, excited but definitely nervous about her first time out. “I’ve always wanted to do it — ’cause my dad races,” she says.
She wears a loose, black T-shirt and torn jeans, with streaks of blonde in her long hair. Nikki says her dad got her the truck for her birthday, tonight being a sort-of working-class cotillion for this debutante. “My dad bought it specifically for the race,” she says, smiling.
Dad — Gus Clark, forty — is tall, square-jawed, and skinny, with a mustache, piercings, and tattoos. He wears a blue bandanna around his forehead. Despite Nikki’s impending race, Gus seems relaxed. He points out that his other daughter, April, nineteen, is also racing. Asked if he’s worried, Gus shrugs. “They both been wantin’ to,” he says.
Nikki realizes she still has to get her truck over to tech inspection before hitting the line-up. She climbs out of the door’s chained-shut window opening and runs off to get something. When she re-appears a minute later, instead of climbing back in feet-first like other racers, she steps back and dives through the window, head first, her legs momentarily hanging in mid-air before she crawls across the bench seat, sits upright, and throws on her helmet.
Behind Gate One is a mid-size, dull-brown administration building that looks like a seventies pre-fab ranch home. On a fall afternoon, in a wood-paneled room that smells of stale cigarettes, two older ladies in pastel polyester — wearing cat-eye glasses and bee-hive hair-do’s — sit behind modest desks, one answering calls and the other shrouded behind computer monitors and file holders. Paper tape from an electric calculator spills down the front of one desk, splayed out on the beige carpet. Down the hall is Andy’s large, carpeted office, complete with wooden desk, TV and plants.
Ralph’s bare boned office, meanwhile, is in the garage, next to the track’s fire truck, with fluorescent lights, hospital-shiny floor tiles, a metal filing cabinet, and a row of black plastic chairs lining one wall. On his grey metal desk sits three pairs of reading glasses and a black ashtray that holds a half-dozen crushed Winstons.
The walls are covered with framed pictures from Ralph’s thirty-two years of dirt-track racing, in black-and-white and color — Ralph standing next to race cars; kneeling in front of race cars; sitting in race cars; driving race cars; and holding large, shiny trophies next to race cars. Some pictures are of only race cars.
Ralph scoots his squeaky chair back and forth. His Maine accent is slight but noticeable. With a clenched jaw, he starts a lot of sentences with, “Of course, nowadays…,” calling lawyers “deal-killers,” insurance companies “wackos,” and the Department of Environmental Protection “clowns.” Delivery trucks roll by the open overhead doorway and drivers honk or wave.
Ralph recounts how, after signing the paperwork to purchase the track in 1981, his wife Jane worked the concessions and ticket booths, and their teenaged sons, Glenn and Andy, helped out, too. By the time Andy graduated from high school, he was doing payroll and promotion, and Glenn even had some local success racing. In 1985, they removed the track’s oil-soaked clay dirt and replaced it with asphalt, a monumental renovation that forever changed auto racing at Beech Ridge. Instead of sliding around the corners, drivers could hold speed through the turns. They could go twice as fast.
In the early nineties, when Andy was still learning the business, Ralph told his son that he wanted to add a new event to draw more fans. He said it would be called Day of Destruction, and that Andy should come up with some ideas. When Andy asked for an explanation, Ralph told him, “We’ll crash a bunch of stuff.” It wasn’t bona-fide racing, but it would help draw in a new crowd. Ralph shrugs. “Some people just wanna see a car get wrecked,” he says.
It helped. The track had its ups-and-downs over the next few years, but was finally running smoothly enough that Ralph and Jane, then in their sixties, started thinking of retirement. The sons were ambivalent about taking over, so Ralph tried to sell the track, but the deals always fell through. Having worked at Beech Ridge for more than a dozen years, Andy and Glenn began to realize they didn’t want to work for a new owner. So they approached their dad, working out the financing and sale within the family, and without lawyers.
The brothers got along well. But Glenn, with a wife and two young boys, still itched to carve out a life of his own. After several years at Beech Ridge, Glenn came across an opportunity to buy a general store in northern Maine. He wanted out. Andy bought out his brother’s half of the business. Glenn and his wife used the money to purchase the store, moving the family “up-country.”
Even though Glenn’s decision left Andy “holding the bag,” as he says, Andy didn’t begrudge his brother for “chasing an opportunity.” And Andy was pretty much used to running things anyway, especially since the brothers had always worked independently. Still, it was a major turning point for Andy, and for Beech Ridge.
When things didn’t work out for Glenn in northern Maine, Andy, in 2007, welcomed his brother’s return, simple as that. “Back to his roots,” Andy says. He gave Glenn his old job back, as general manager. Glenn, now fifty-three, and his sons, Nicholas, twenty-five, and Justin, twenty-eight, all work at the track, making Beech Ridge quite literally a Cusack family affair, with Andy’s nephews working alongside their father, uncle, and grandparents.
Ralph still works the grounds at Beech Ridge, meanwhile, as he’s done for the past thirty years, filling in ruts and potholes with a backhoe, then leveling the dirt by dragging around a welded-steel sled chained to a pickup. Married for almost sixty years, Ralph leaves the track every day at noon, heading down Holmes Road in his pickup to have lunch with Jane, his high-school sweetheart from Scarborough High.
“I don’t have a whole lot to do here now,” Ralph says, his voice quiet. “I just putt around.”
His job title? “Oh, uh….CEO, I guess,” he says.
From across the track, the rectangular cluster of dense humanity in the stands hums, the way that large groups of people do before a public event. It’s an all-white audience, the lack of racial diversity reflecting both southern Maine’s population and the overall sport of auto-racing. But aside from race, the crowd is diverse, ranging from toddlers to old-timers, co-ed groups to clusters of boys or girls, tweens to older couples to a few men who sit quietly alone. Most wear jeans, except for the young men in cargo shorts and a few girls in sweatpants. Older fans sport buttoned satin jackets with NASCAR or other racing logos. The ball caps tend toward logos of car repair, construction, or towing companies.
Families cluster together after laying down blankets over the coarse boards, staking out turf. They munch on concession-stand favorites: Hot Rod Dogs, Piston Onion Rings, French-fried Wires, Hot Lap Nachos, White Knuckle Nuggets with fries, Green Flag Burgers, and Blow Out Superburgers, washed down with “Engine Coolants” like Pepsi or Mountain Dew. Track workers in aprons walk through the crowd clutching strips of light-blue fifty-fifty raffle tickets, two for a dollar — the pot to be split between the track and the winner. Fans at the top of the stands stay on their feet to get a better look, and down in front, junior-high girls in multi-colored Converse hi-tops walk back and forth, giggling and leaning into each other. Parents take turns holding infants.
Drinkers and smokers are separated from families by a fenced-in corral at the end of the track that everyone calls the Beer Garden, where a policeman and a track worker guard the gate. A crowd, mostly men, stands on picnic tables and benches under a cloud of smoke, drinking three dollar Budweisers from plastic cups.
Joe Croteau is from nearby Standish. “I been coming here since I was four,” he says. He can recite the names of racers who’ve won championships from the nineties to the present. He says he is forty-five, but his wife chimes in about that: “He’s a liar!” she yells. They both laugh.
Tyler Gleason, thirty, from South Portland, explains, “Part of the attraction here is the live action.” His voice slow and slightly slurry, he pauses, looks out over the track, and adds, admiringly, “The smell of burnt rubber.”
Over in the main stands, Sarah Pettingill, twenty-one, has brought her boyfriend and says she’s been coming here “since I was in a car seat.” She’s smiling a lot because she just won the track’s fifty-fifty raffle, leaving her with a check for one thousand and twenty-five dollars — money that will go towards her college textbooks, she says. “It feels nice to win something.”
Over the PA, the high-energy announcer cracks jokes and teases drivers and track workers. Where’d you get your license — a Cracker Jack box? Or, Your mother know you drive like that? He interjects the taunts with goofy sounds and snippets from cartoons or songs.
The MacLeans, of New Gloucester, have driven a half-hour with a coterie of grandchildren. “My granddaughter loves the Backwards Racing,” says Carrie, fifty-three, “but I like the Spectator.” Lily, who’s six, says that her favorite part is when the cars “hit the jump.”
Day of Destruction has a formula that hasn’t changed much in the past twenty-odd years: The night starts with the Spectator Drags and ends with car-killing events like the Ramp Race. In the one-lap Spectator Drags, the rules are few — drivers have to wear a helmet, cars have to be street-legal with seat belts, and, to minimize the chances of a fiery explosion, they are limited to five gallons of gas in the tank. A tall and brawny man named Junior lines up several-dozen cars on the infield road before they head to the start line. Andy stalks back and forth, talking into his radio, often suggesting which cars should get paired, with both men ultimately collaborating on which machines they think are equal. The two cars race once around the track, and the winner goes on to the next round. In the final round, it’s customary for the cars to go two-out-of-three.
After the Spectator racing comes the intermission show, which usually includes some sort of object being blown up at the track’s center. Tonight’s victim is a Porta Potti, with the words “TOURIST INFO” written in large, stenciled-block letters across the front. The announcer teases the crowd: “Somebody maaaaay have had too many beans for dinner!” The explosive whoosh sends the side panels rocketing outward, followed by a giant orange fireball that reaches several stories high. The crowd whistles and cheers approval.
After workers clean everything up, the crash-em’-ups begin. A parade of smashers — any old thing with four wheels that still runs — advance from the back of the track in rows of two. Large stuffed animals are strapped to the hood of some, while others are slathered in odd-colored paint. Most have spray-painted double-digit numbers on the sides, but some drivers get a little more creative, with names like “MUDDY BUDDY” or “ANDY’S AUTO DETAIL” squiggled along the sides. One car has mock dartboard circles next to the words, “HIT HERE.” The loudspeakers blast fast-paced heavy metal music.
With no lights or glass windows except for the front, the innards ripped out and stripped down to the frames, the cars look like something out of Mad Max. Drivers do burnouts while waiting to race, the engines revving and wheels grinding deliberately in a smoky screech, leaving the entire lineup in a foggy haze.
Instead of a flat-out demolition derby, what comes next is a series of events designed to slowly disintegrate the cars and entertain the fans. Still requiring a good deal of driving skill, the crash-em’-up races offer a gradual process of elimination that culminates with a surviving car, the eventual winner. One such event is the Water Drags, in which cars speed down to a finish line where the track’s been hosed down with water — the closest to the line without going over is the winner. This results in a few light crashes, with some cars bumping others over the line to take the win.
Then comes the Backwards Drag Race. The cars line up facing backwards in rows of four, and then floor it down the straightaway. Jerking back and forth, the drivers’ necks twisted around, the cars roar past — most lack mufflers — sometimes crashing into each other with loud thuds. Tow trucks are sent out when cars break down, and if the wheels still roll, they are pushed off the track.
Andy Cusack often speaks in a strange hybrid of genuine feeling and promotional sales talk, honed by years pitching the track. Like an improv comedian conjuring up one-liners, he speaks as if he has a Rolodex of quotes in the back of his mind. On why the track offers crash-em’-up racing: “We’re in the business of selling tickets.” On racing in general: “More dangerous than sitting in the library.” Or on an event finally getting underway: “The pre-show’s the gun, and this is pulling the trigger.”
But away from the noise, cars, and lights, in the privacy of his office, his speech becomes less pitch-worthy. When asked how many hours a week he works, Andy looks momentarily lost. “I have no idea,” he says, in the slow cadence of someone who doesn’t really want to know. On race days, he says he tries to keep his heart rate down and stay cool-headed, something he says he learned from his parents. But the business can still get to him. “Every Monday morning till noon, the track’s for sale,” he says.
If there’s a bit of weariness in his voice, it’s a reminder that he’s been at the track for a while. Toted along as a baby to watch his dad race, more than fifty years ago, Andy has, in one form or another, spent his entire life at this small, southern Maine roundy-round. He smiles and his voice goes up a pitch. “I was that kid growing up in the grandstands,” he says. “I was passionate about it, too. Couldn’t wait to get here.” His favorite memory is of coming home late with his family for pie and ice cream, everyone still covered in dust after a long night watching dirt-track races.
He was fifteen, a high school freshman, in 1981, when his parents parents bought the track. Andy explains that having done clerical work at his dad’s other business, selling construction equipment, it seemed only natural that he would carry on at Beech Ridge. “I did bookwork back in the days before we had computers. So, when we bought the racetrack, there was obviously a lot more paperwork that came along with that,” he says. “I can remember having to go to the office at three in the morning before school, because I had, you know, seventy-five paychecks to write out.”
Andy takes off on a tangent — about tax-table ledgers, how to calculate Social Security, and how computers and Quickbooks changed accounting in general. “But I can still run an adding machine pretty good,” he says, smiling. “’Cause I had a lot of practice.”
In his early twenties, Andy took classes to beef up his business skills, but soon realized he was far ahead of his peers. At Beech Ridge, he’s done just about everything, including some concessions work in his younger years. He is a “hands-on” manager, who has worked at various positions around the track not only to help out, but also to understand every facet of the business. “I still fill in on a ticket window every now and then, just for an hour or so if they’re a little short,” he says, “just to get a line through.”
Andy used to write out the radio scripts and lay out newspaper ads, driving into Portland to make edits for the Press-Herald. Now he hires someone to promote the track on social media. “I don’t even know what some of the technologies are today,” he says. Suddenly curious, he pulls up Beech Ridge’s website, swings the flat-screen monitor around, and squints at the icons at the top of the screen. “Let’s see….Oh, yeah; This must be Facebook, and…Twitter…YouTube.…What’s this one? Oh…Instagram; That’s what we do,” he says, nodding.
After beating several dozen cars in the Spectator Drags event earlier in the evening, Steve Delage parked his Audi A4 in the pits near the track, picked up his trophy from the tower, and set it on the car’s roof, propping up the flag so that the black-and-white checkered fabric draped down over the side. Later next week, he’ll come home from work and find in his mailbox an envelope from Beech Ridge with a $500 check inside, the words “For Winning Spectator Drags” handwritten in the lower left hand corner.
Round faced, with dirt under the nails of his muscular hands, Steve lives less than a quarter-mile down the road and has been racing at Beech Ridge for the past three years. “It’s been a dream of mine ever since I was a little kid,” he says. He works as a mechanic at Maine Turbo Diesel in Arundel, and says he owns $40,000 in tools and has seen every Fast and Furious movie ever made. He’s into “anything with an engine,” and owns several other cars, a Jeep, a boat, and a Harley. As a boy, he says, he learned about cars from his grandfathers and uncles, started wrenching on them when he was fourteen, and began racing at eighteen.
After reading an article on Audi performance modifications or “mods,” he bought the A4 “shell with a title” for a hundred dollars; dropped a V-8 motor in the tiny engine compartment meant for an engine half that size; and topped it off with a custom-built supercharger. “It was like throwing together a puzzle,” Steve says. Since the stock all-wheel-drive system didn’t provide good traction, he ripped that out and welded the front and rear differentials together, a mod that put “power to all the wheels” — the work confirmed in a video on Steve’s iPhone, where the Audi performs a four-wheel burnout until the entire car disappears in thick, white smoke. “That car was put together in three days,” he says.
Before the race, he held his cards close to his chest. “I didn’t have my hood open much; try to keep it hush-hush,” he says. “They don’t know — but I know,” he says, smiling.
The smoke coming from his car during the race was just power steering fluid leaking out onto his exhaust manifold, and that even though the other driver said he saw flames under the car, Steve says he wasn’t worried. As a matter-of-fact, he says his car wasn’t even running right because of a stuck-open bypass valve on the supercharger — and he still won.
According to Steve, it’s all about the start. At the line, he pins the gas with his right foot so the rev limiter holds the engine at seventy-five hundred, while simultaneously “side-stepping,” or just barely holding down the clutch with his left foot, to “let it pop quicker.” He waits until he sees the slightest flicker of movement from the flag man’s hand, and right then — like, right then — he’d better pop the clutch, because by the time it goes from the flag-man’s twitching hand to Steve’s eyes, to his brain, to his feet, to the pedal, and then to that clutch actually releasing, those critical nanoseconds before the car starts “burnin’ sixty feet of tire” could make or break the race.
In the final winner-defining race, Steve says he knew he was in trouble, his Audi several lengths behind as both cars barreled out of turn two and onto the back straight. “I had to do something,” Steve says. Was it ethical to go off the track and into the infield dirt? Steve pauses. “It’s like a street fight; there’s no such thing as a clean street fight,” he says.
Hard on the Subaru’s bumper, Steve yanked the wheel left and onto the infield’s raised rumble strips, the car banging around so much he thought it might rip off his oil pan. “I just dropped down hard,” he says. “I caught air as I was coming around the corner.” When the Audi started sliding sideways, Steve says everything turned into a dreamlike, slow motion state in which he knew to just let the steering wheel go loose.
“There are times when I’m driving my car,” he says, pausing, “It just does what it has to do.”
The Beech Ridge experience can feel like some forgotten corner of an earlier, perhaps more genuine America. Growing up at Beech Ridge and never leaving is an old-fashioned phenomenon, too, a throwback to when small businesses were crafted and built by family, then handed down to well-taught children.
“It’s a passion, and I’m passionate about making this place work right,” Andy says. Some have other words for passion. One of his workers calls Andy “cantankerous,” saying that the boss is “nitpicky and controlling.” Andy shrugs when he hears that, and says he just wants things done right. “Sometimes you gotta crack a whip,” he says. “We’re not The Waltons.”
Still, as with The Waltons, the word family does seem to be at the forefront of conversation at Beech Ridge — with racers, fans, workers, and even Andy himself — a steady drumbeat of the virtues of sticking together, staying loyal, relying on each other, and ultimately, surviving. “If you’ve never been a part of it, it’s hard to understand,” says Dan Litchfield, a large, round man in his mid-fifties, handsome with a trim, grey-peppered beard and lively eyes. He worked for more than twenty years at Scarboro Auto Parts, a sprawling junkyard a quarter-mile down the road from Beech Ridge, and says that he could’ve installed “countless swimming pools” with the money he’s spent sponsoring teams, building cars, and supporting drivers. He remembers watching Ralph race in the sixties, and says that he’s known the Cusacks his entire life.
According to Litchfield, Beech Ridge is well respected in the area. “Andy Cusack is a communicator,” he says, drawing out the last word. “He’s a great track owner and promoter.” Dan thinks there’s a lot riding on Andy’s shoulders these days. “It costs a lot of money to unlock those gates,” he says. He wishes Andy would charge more for admission, but understands that he just wants the stands full.
Litchfield explains that on race nights, his old boss helped clear wrecked cars with the junkyard’s bright-yellow front-end loader, and Dan occasionally volunteered on the track’s emergency crew. Andy dropped off tickets. “Andy takes care of family,” Dan says, referring to himself, or the junkyard, or perhaps to the larger Beech Ridge racing community — it doesn’t seem to matter, because it all blurs together, “family” being anyone or anything connected to the Cusacks or Beech Ridge or southern Maine auto racing in general, a network that permeates outward throughout Scarborough, from Oak Hill Ace Hardware to Emma’s Eats at Pine Point Beach, from the Scarborough Public Library to Anjon’s Italian Restaurant, lying low in the marsh off Route One.
Andy wants children to have fond memories of Beech Ridge, so that when they’re older, they’ll bring their families back. He holds ticket prices down — ten dollars for Day of Destruction, with kids between six and twelve at half price, six and under free, and for Thursday Thunder, tickets are four dollars, with kids under twelve free. He gears some events specifically towards children, complete with mascots like the checkered-flag-themed Speedy, a floppy-eared red dog, and the daredevil stunt-rider Fire Fly, a superhero with large eyes and small antennae.
Andy says that he often gets letters from families, about what the track means to them. He hones in on one letter in particular, in which a family from New York explains that when they vacation every year in Maine, the one thing that they love to do is watch some racing at Beech Ridge. After their mother died in the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks, the grieving family decided to keep returning every year to Beech Ridge anyway, as a tribute to their shared experience as a family. Andy’s voice breaks when he tells the story, and it’s startling when he tears up.
When the tow truck drags out a welded angle iron and three-quarter-inch plate steel ramp, the crowd gets restless. In the Ramp Race, four cars line up at one end of the straightaway, then, at the green flag, they floor it to be the first over the ramp, which is about ten feet long, two feet tall — and just wide enough for a single car.
Then it all starts. The deep, concussive sound of smashers banging into each other resonates throughout the track. Cars lose bumpers like kids lose mittens. Mufflers pop off and trunk lids fly open. Some cars go slow over the ramp, but most hit it with speed and get good air before splatting down on the asphalt. Besides winning, the Ramp Race is also a contest about who can fly the highest and the farthest.
As the night winds down, a final event gets underway. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on at first, but it looks like this: Several cars emerge at one end of the track, arrive at the middle, and proceed to slam and bash into each other over and over and over again until one or all of the cars quits moving. This eliminates cars rather quickly, of course — either because the engines won’t run anymore, or because they’re stuck on flat tires and bent rims. It’s difficult to discern a winner; the contest here appears to be more of a showcase for drivers who want to put on a good show for the audience.
Pam Bailey, forty-five, from nearby Biddeford, would like to make something clear. “I am not a racing fan,” she says, blushing and giggling. A sign language interpreter for the Biddeford School District, she says she’s been coming to Beech Ridge for the past ten years — but not for auto racing. “I go just for the crash-up part and don’t really care about the drive-around-in-a-circle part,” she says, laughing. To say that Pam prefers the crash-em’-up demolition-derby-style racing doesn’t adequately describe her feelings. “I just come unglued,” she says.
“So a friend of mine invited me to one of the Days of Destruction about ten years ago — she had little boys, and she’s like, ‘Oh, we’re going to this,’” Pam explains, “and I thought, ‘Oh, go with the kids, it’ll be fun,’ you know, like, crash up cars or whatever. And I……was like……transformed.”
Pam used to only come to the three Day of Destruction events offered during every racing season, but then she learned from the track’s website that Car Wars happens every Friday in August. “I’m pretty much there every Friday night,” she says.
“With baseball and football, you’re going to a game, there’s gonna be referees, this is not acceptable; this is acceptable….It’s just kinda like, ‘no holds barred; anything’s possible.’”
According to Andy Cusack, Day of Destruction is not the “core product” at Beech Ridge. He says that his Saturday NASCAR nights are the main attraction, the “real” racing, and that the cheap-ticket nights on the schedule, like Thursday Thunder and Car Wars and Day of Destruction, were all designed to simply draw new fans to the track.
“We just thought, if we get them here, they’ll find out where the place is, and then they’ll naturally say, ‘Well I gotta go see the NASCAR series,’” Andy says. But: “It hasn’t worked!” What he found instead was that each series eventually developed its own niche audience, and that those fans tend to stick to their specific series. “There’s very little cross-over percentage-wise between Day of Destruction, Car Wars, or Thursday Thunder or NASCAR Nights,” he says.
Andy has made peace with sub-par low-tier racing events, admitting that nights like Day of Destruction are his bread and butter, a trade-off that supplements the serious, big-purse racing that goes on throughout the season. Promoted and produced by Beech Ridge alone, Day of Destruction money doesn’t have to be shared with promoters or racing organizations such as NASCAR. That money goes directly to the track. Andy won’t say how much; just that each distinct “market” is profitable.
“The gratifying part to me, is that in Portland, Maine, with a population base of, what, a hundred fifty-thousand in the Greater Portland area, that those four different series all draw their own audience segments,” he says. “When you start dividing up the numbers, how many people do you really have to draw from that have the wherewithal to go to a race, the interest to go to a race, who aren’t the sweater-clad art people who never go to a race? There’s not much of a slice of pie out there for people interested in motorsports entertainment, and yet, all four series do really well.”
That hasn’t always been the case. Five or so years ago, coming down off the nation’s deep recession, things weren’t looking so good for Beech Ridge. “Cash for Clunkers really did us in,” Andy says, referring to the 2009 Federal Government’s Car Allowance Rebate System, the incentive-based program designed to stimulate sagging car sales and yank less fuel-efficient vehicles off the road. Economist Christopher Westley renamed it “I Hate the Poor Act of 2009,” because it took over 700,000 used cars off the market, making it difficult and more expensive for working-class families to find transportation. And with high unemployment and steel at six cents a pound, many of the remaining cars were sold for scrap, all of which made it difficult for Beech Ridge racers to get their hands on a smasher. At nights like Day of Destruction, where normally a hundred smashers might show up, the track was lucky to get forty. Andy struggled to put together shows.
But here in the pits in 2014, he seems a little more upbeat. “It’s been a good year,” Andy says. “Crowds and weather; we’ve gotten in almost every show.” And since it’s near the end of the season, Andy’s feeling somewhat relieved.
“I keep lookin’ down at the pit gate,” he says, leaning forward. “And if I see cars there, then, I’m like, ‘We’re good.”’
Andy is always watching the gates. “It’s like havin’ a party at your house. You always wonder, ‘Are the guests really gonna show up? Is this gonna be the party where only two or three people show up, and the other twenty-five didn’t?’” he asks. Andy knows from past experience that unless it’s raining, fans and racers have always shown up for an event, but still, he’s never 100 percent sure, the weight of failure omnipresent. “You’ve always got that question in the back of your head: ‘Is today the day?’” he says.
Constantly scanning the sky, Andy talks about the weather and how it alters course once it gets near Beech Ridge. “A lot of times there’ll be a rain front moving in from the Western mountains, and it’ll get to Windham and Westbrook, but then it gets here, a couple miles from the ocean, and the temperature changes enough that it stops the thunderstorm. You can see the shower-line up over the Westbrook line — you can see it — and I know it’s raining there and the phones are going crazy, and Facebook’s going crazy, and it’s like, ‘No, it’s not raining here. In fact, the sun just broke out.’” Andy laughs. “It’s awfully hard for someone sitting in Windham to believe that it’s not raining here in Scarborough when it’s pouring at their place.”
Andy works long hours on long days; always checking the weather and running the numbers on his desktop adding machine; haggling with promoters; lining up sponsors, advertisers, and employees. Later, he’ll often lie awake at night, praying that it all comes together — for the sport, for the track, for the fans, for the family.
It’s near the end of the show, and the little blue car just won’t give up, circling and then backing up into the white mangled pickup truck with the words “REDNECK” scribbled across the sides in red spray-paint. The boxy-looking car is crunched-up but still agile, moving in quickly and connecting hard with metal-smashing thumps.
In one of the last “races” at the Day of Destruction, the two vehicles swoop out to the track’s center and start spinning around and slamming into each other, the truck occasionally making a solid hit. The mid-nineties Honda Civic has better mobility and more speed, the driver using the back end to hammer away, since the front is caved-in, wounded from a previous fight. Like boxers in a ring, it’s obvious that the Honda has the upper hand, the older truck now tired, the younger car taking advantage, diving in with solid jabs.
But the truck is still moving, not winning any technical points but nowhere near quitting, and the little car sounds like a runaway sewing machine, a strange wound-up whine magnified by the loss of a muffler, torn off races ago. The car pulls forward then shifts into reverse, the engine builds up to a zzzzzziiiiiiiinnnngg before coming in fast to smack the truck again, like a disturbed, mad hornet. The Civic’s back end occasionally climbs up and onto the truck a little, the car’s front wheels screaming against the asphalt, the motor wailing long after the initial hit.
And the fans are on their feet because they just can’t believe what they’re seeing: Surely that little car should’ve given out long ago. Instead, the Honda’s found some untapped reservoir of spirit, the hits picking up rhythm, over and over again, the race having gone on longer than any other race — even though it’s probably only been a minute or two, it seems like an eternity.
“All right guys, c’mon now,” the announcer says. “That’s enough; the race is over….” But apparently not, because the vehicles continue to circle each other, the Honda flailing away, now with rage and obsessive focus, as if the little car believes that-this-truck-must-die.
And now the Honda’s back wheels are slumped and folded-in, just skidding along, shoved forward and backward by the front two spinning furiously, the car barely able to steer; just enough to take aim at the truck and back up again, plowing into the driver’s door and ramping up high, so high that the Honda is suspended at a forty-five-degree angle, the driver hanging there and gloating before dropping down, pulling forward and taking aim again. The fans are screaming and whistling and throwing up their hands, total strangers turning to look at each other, eyes wide and mouths agape but no words coming out….. Did you see that? Did you see that?
Long after the cars stagger back to the pits, the Civic’s back end dragging on the ground and the pickup throwing sparks as it rolls, the crowd carries on, cheering and fist-bumping, the passionate performance receiving a standing ovation as the smoke clears. Everyone understands that this was a once-in-a-lifetime performance.
As the night winds down, the announcer thanks the crowd. The fans pour down from the stands, past trashcans overflowing with Pepsi cups and cardboard food boxes. The solemn procession fans out across Holmes Road to the dirt lots crammed with cars, headlights popping on, a chorus of starting engines, families heading home.
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