Eldora Speedway: Where a Forgotten America Lives on
The road to Eldora Speedway does not pass through Troy, Ohio, but it damn sure runs straight through the heart of Troy’s favorite racing son, Jack Hewitt. Few drivers got around the half-mile dirt oval the way Jack did, and no one attacked its steeply banked turns as aggressively. Eldora is no place for timidity, and there has never been anything timid about Hewitt.
This story originally appeared in Volume 17 of Road & Track.
Hewitt’s faithful fans had a verse about their hero’s penchant for high-testosterone outside passes: “Jack Hewitt rides high, ’cause he ain’t afraid to die.”
He was the star of perhaps the most celebrated night in the track’s history (we’ll get to that), and these days, he’s retired but still rowdy at age 71. Hewitt remains everyone’s go-to Eldora authority. Ask him what makes the joint so special, and he says, “For the fans, every big race there is a happening. Everybody’s heard that old saying, ‘I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out.’ At Eldora, you go to a party, and a race breaks out.
“And as a driver you like it because you can finish 20th and still feel like you’ve done something. If you ran the whole feature with your right-rear tire six inches from the concrete, and you didn’t crash, you had a heck of a night.”
Eldora owes its existence to the late Earl Baltes and its staying power to Tony Stewart. Different men from different times, they shared a stubbornness and a flair for the dramatic.
Baltes was a bandleader and dance-hall operator. Sometime after World War II, a Sunday drive took him past a crowded dirt track in the next county. Curious, he bought a ticket, watched the jalopies run, and found his calling.
The grounds behind his Eldora Ballroom, alongside Ohio Route 118 north of tiny Rossburg, formed a natural amphitheater. Baltes’s imagination went into overdrive: Yes, I’ll have some grandstands sloping down from that ridge. And right there, at the bottom, a nice speedway. Eldora Speedway. Yes.
By the spring of 1954, the track, then just a quarter-mile, was ready. A week or so before opening day, one of the region’s stock-car studs took the first exploratory laps. He’d driven in from Troy, almost 40 miles to the southeast. It was Don Hewitt, Jack’s dad.
In 1958, Eldora was expanded to its current configuration, and its frequent special events eased it onto the national map. The Sixties were thick with dates for USAC sprints and ARCA stock cars. In 1971, Baltes staged the first World 100 for Late Models; it paid a stout $4000 to win, and the money left with a Cincinnati-area driver named Bruce Gould. His smile was matched only by the one Baltes wore as he counted the receipts.
From there, Eldora’s legend only grew. The press cheered Baltes’s “Dolly Parton purses” featuring outsize numbers on top. In 1984 came the first Kings Royal for winged sprints, its $50,000 prize won by his highness himself, Steve “the King” Kinser. Ten years later, Freddy Smith was the victor in a Baltes promotion called the Dream. The name was vague—today it’s the Dirt Late Model Dream—but there was nothing unclear about the $100,000 Smith won, roughly 10 times the money offered by some other big races.
Today Partonesque short-track events are more common. But Billy Moyer, a six-time World 100 champion and twice a winner of the Dream, explains, “Earl was the first guy to stick his neck out and schedule these big races.”
In June 2001, Baltes went over the top, paying a whopping $1 million for a Late Model victory. Donnie Moran was the winner of what turned out to be Baltes’s only Eldora Million. The race turned a profit, said Baltes, but the worrying was hell.
Many insist that the Eldora Million 2001 was the track’s biggest-ever night, but there’s another to consider. Eldora’s autumn menu includes the 4-Crown Nationals, a full card of racing for USAC’s Silver Crown, sprint, and midget divisions, supported by low-buck modifieds. In 1998, Jack Hewitt conquered all four classes.
Those were days of ups and downs for Hewitt. His dad, Don, died in June 1997. In May 1998, Jack fulfilled both their dreams by qualifying for the Indianapolis 500. Now, at Eldora, a place they both cherished, he’d authored a four-race fairy tale. “Snow White and Cinderella,” Hewitt declared, “they don’t have nothing on me tonight.”
Earl Baltes was a simple man, and his 2004 sale of Eldora to Tony Stewart was as straightforward as Baltes himself. By then, Stewart had won the first of his three NASCAR Cup Series championships and raced his way to considerable wealth. One weekday at his home in Columbus, Indiana, the phone rang just after he’d gotten out of bed. It was Baltes.
He said, “I need you to come talk to me.”
Stewart said, “When?”
“Now.”
Stewart said he could be there in four hours.
“I’ll see you then,” said Baltes.
They met in the Eldora parking lot and strolled through the front gate, level with the top row of grandstands.
“We walked down about three rows,” Stewart recalls, “and sat down like we were getting ready to watch hot laps.”
Baltes got right to the point. He was 83, his health wasn’t what it used to be, and his doctor was advising him to eliminate stress. He and his wife, Berneice, had been talking things over, “and we think you’d be the right guy to take over Eldora.”
Today this is how Stewart recalls the moment: “I about had a heart attack. But I also knew this was a huge honor.”
They agreed to continue the conversation in the days ahead. It emerged that two other groups were interested in purchasing the track. Baltes later said both were ready to pay a price higher than the one he’d discussed with Stewart, but Baltes had made up his mind about who he wanted to own the property. The sale was announced in November 2004.
The impact of Stewart’s ownership was immediate. In June 2005 and for the next seven summers, Eldora held a Late Model special in the middle of the week leading into the Dream. The annual Prelude to the Dream was an invitational for Stewart’s pals from NASCAR and the wider racing world.
The Prelude met every goal Stewart had for it: The pay-per-view broadcasts raised piles of money for assorted charities, it drew thousands of fans who might otherwise never have gone to a dirt track, and the competitors had fun. But ultimately, the race was a victim of its own success. Scheduling busy drivers from so many disciplines and getting them all to Ohio was a headache.
In 2013, the NASCAR Truck Series made its first of seven stops at Eldora. This was news; not since 1970 had a national NASCAR tour raced a dirt track. The event happened only because Stewart pushed for it with Baltes-level determination. But when he learned in the fall of 2020 that the Cup Series dirt race he coveted for Eldora would instead run on a temporary surface at Bristol Motor Speedway, Stewart again channeled his inner Baltes. He threw away the NASCAR sanction agreement that would have covered the 2021 Truck Series event.
Stewart can be quick on the trigger, but he is no control freak. In situations where he’s comfortable, he is a master delegator. His NASCAR, NHRA, and World of Outlaws teams, as well as the All Star Circuit of Champions—a winged-sprint-car series he purchased in 2015—run smoothly whether he’s around or not. You get the sense that he’s involved in every key decision, but he is not intrusively hands-on.
So it goes at Eldora, where Jerry Gappens, in his second season as general manager, says, “Tony lets me do my job.”
Born into an Indiana short-track family, Gappens steered quarter-midgets as a boy and a sprint car in his teens. His Ball State education led to an editorial role at Chris Economaki’s National Speed Sport News, followed by 23 years with Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Inc., during which he served as senior vice president of events and marketing at Charlotte Motor Speedway and executive vice president and general manager at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Under Economaki, he earned “a PhD in all phases of racing,” and at Charlotte, he absorbed Humpy Wheeler’s sermons on “the four Ts” of promotion: tickets, traffic, toilets, and trash.
He left SMI in 2015 and eventually returned to Indiana, where he leased the I-69 Speedway in Gas City. His programs there were quick and efficient, as Wheeler had conditioned him to loathe delays. Gappens finds nothing funny in the way some dirt-track announcers make agricultural jokes whenever water trucks and graders appear. “If farming was a spectator sport,” he says, “you’d see grandstands in cornfields.”
When Roger Slack left Eldora in early 2022 after 12 years as GM, Stewart hired Gappens, who oversees eight full-time employees and more than 200 race-weekend workers.
Both Stewart and Gappens have an eye on Eldora’s future, but they’re aware that changes risk disenchanting loyalists protective of the track’s homespun character. Unlike tracks that charge amusement-park rates for concessions, Eldora has kept prices low; a beer costs $2, and a hot dog $3. Still, some objected to the addition of VIP suites. Never mind that renting them helps pay for things like the state-of-the-art infield medical center; to traditionalists, tradition matters.
Their criticism probably stings Stewart more than he lets on, because he’s a traditionalist too. But he leans on the decade of conversations he had with Baltes between the sale of the track and Baltes’s death in 2015. “Anytime I had an idea to do something new,” Stewart recalls, “I’d call Earl and say, ‘This is what I’d like to do.’ Most of the time, his answer was either ‘Gee, I never thought of that’ or ‘I thought about doing that myself but never got around to it.’
“I always got his blessing before I did anything, because to me, I was continuing his legacy. And that’s the way I still see it. Everything we do, I ask myself: Would Earl approve?”
Eldora has always defined careers. That happened for Stewart in 1995, when he won both the midget and sprint-car portions of the 4-Crown Nationals. That was Stewart’s storied “Triple Crown” season, when he was champion of all three USAC divisions, and that sprint-car victory clinched the first of those titles.
In September 2011, Kyle Larson was a Northern California winged-sprint-car kid transitioning into Midwest USAC life. He got his first look at Eldora on 4-Crown weekend and proceeded to sweep the Silver Crown, sprint, and midget features. It announced his ascendance. “To this day,” says Larson, “I feel like that was probably the most important night of my career, because immediately my name got out there.”
Eldora can’t simply bestow greatness on any driver. But every so often, Baltes’s acres—Stewart’s acres now—will identify one who’s got the goods and help point him out to those who aren’t seeing the sparkle.
It happened that way for Georgia Late Model shoe Jonathan Davenport. He’d been winning for years, but it was an Eldora hot streak that put him on Broadway. He captured the Dream in 2015, five of eight World 100s from 2015 to 2022, and a 2020 event called the Intercontinental Classic, run before an empty house due to COVID-19.
Last June, Stewart resurrected the Eldora Million and added a calendar-appropriate $2022 extra on top. Davenport won that one too, and suddenly his name was known in race-town taverns all over the U.S.
Incidentally, that $1,002,022 is believed to be the second-highest winner’s purse in all of motorsport last year, trailing only the $3.1 million bagged by Indy 500 winner Marcus Ericsson. Not bad for a dirt track alongside Ohio Route 118.
This spring, standing in the Eldora pits, Davenport summed up the Eldora magic: “For whatever reason, everything just means more here. There’s an electricity, a vibe in the air that you don’t find anywhere else.”
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