Attica Raceway Park puts it in overdrive
Drivers, crew and fans delight in area dirt track racing
By Zach Baker
Sports Editor
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ATTICA – There isn’t much pay in it, and Chris Andrews knows it.
For him, driving open wheeled sprint cars at Attica Raceway Park is part of a passion, one that has consumed him much of his life.
“Raising hell at 7, 8 years old,” said Andrews, a former 305 sprints champion and northwest Ohio native. “Young in life, I developed a need for speed.”
That need has persisted. Andrews stood beside his No. 19 green sprint car, about an hour before taking the track on a sunny August evening. As he talked, a number of men and women crowded around the car. Some were mechanics tinkering with the parts, repairing and remapping it in order to get every last ounce of speed and torque out of his car. Others were passionate racing fans, who stopped by to say hello or get a good look at the car.
“This is part of my life, part of everybody’s life,” Andrews said. “We probably see each here more than we do our own family members. It’s just a really neat deal I probably couldn’t live without.”
Steven Linder, who along with his brother Michael was identified by Andrews as his crew chiefs, agreed.
“None of us collect paychecks,” Linder said. “We do this ‘cause we love racing. That’s it.”
And they’re not the only ones. Attica Raceway Park has been drawing scores of racing fans for years, and Rex LeJeune, the director of operations at the park, said the facility has had a good summer.
“Crowds have been pretty good, based on how the weather has been,” LeJeune said. “We had a rain delay (the last weekend of July), and sometimes that hurts. But we have our loyal fanbase that come every week, and for our specials, we get everywhere, people from 55 counties in the state of Ohio, to 17 states and Canada.”
The park itself hosts between 400-500 cars a season. In order to get a sense of the flavor of the event, and the passion of those involved in it, The A-T talked to members of one racing team.
‘This is what I love’
Andrews won titles in 2006 and 2009.
“It’s been a few years, but it just shows you how tough this deal is,” Andrews said. “We missed out on two championships last year, both on the last nights … nonetheless, this is probably one of the toughest areas for sprint cars in the country.”
This year, he changed cars, now driving for Les Mintz out of Gibsonburg. He said there’s been a bit of an adjustment.
“Chemistry’s a huge part,” he said. “You can take the best parts money can buy, and the best crew chiefs, and you might not run good. With this deal, we’ve got the best of everything, and it’s taken a little bit to gel. But we’re getting some speed here towards the end of the year, trying some different things, and there’s nobody in the pit area that tries as hard as we do.”
Linder said every driver, and every car, is different.
“Every driver has their own little thing they like to feel,” Linder said. “That may be hard to understand for some, it’s crazy what goes on in the seat of these race cars when these guys are racing. We’re trying to find the things Chris likes to feel, which puts him in the best position for him to maximize.”
Andrews was asked what makes driving a sprint car different from other kinds of race vehicles.
“Definitely the control, the power, the insanity,” he said. “You get in a stock car, it might be 800 horsepower, but it’s 3,500 pounds, and the reaction is almost seconds. These cars, you get on the gas, and all you see is a bolt of lightning. Just pretty much the control issue and keeping the car underneath you.”
Eventually, the Sandusky native said he hopes to race NASCAR trucks. But he said he expects to continue to race sprint cars.
“We definitely don’t do this for money There are some people that do, but obviously I don’t make anything off of this,” Andrews said. “It’s part of my life. This is what I’m here to do. This is what I love.”
‘I’m not much of a race fan. I’m a competitive guy.’
Ask Steven Linder what he does to prepare a car for Friday nights in Attica, and he’ll start listing what he does each day.
Sunday is motor maintenance. Monday through Wednesday is routine maintenance.
“Thursday night is our load up night, we get the race car out to the trailer, get the trailer back loaded up with supplies, towels, grease, parts cleaner,” Linder says. “All the tools we may have took out of the trailer during the week. Load that stuff up, load the race car up, and then Friday we get off work, leave work, go to the shop and go.”
So, Friday’s a day to watch the race an see the results, right?
Well, no.
“I’m not much of a race fan, I’m a competitive guy,” he said. “When Chris is out on the race track, or I happen to be watching Craig [Mintz, the team’s other driver] at the time, I don’t actually watch the race itself. I’m not watching the guys that are passing each other, I’m watching, what is the race car doing on the race track, what is the driver doing on the track.”
And then the race ends. But the work does not.
“Every race we run, we’re collecting information from what we watch in the pits or from the stands,” Linder said, “and then we always have a debriefing with our driver afterwards, and try to learn as much as we can.”
None of this dedication surprises Andrews. He’s just happy Linder, and his brother Michael are on his side.
“They’ve raced for years, sometimes they build their own cars,” Andrews said. “Steve and Michael Linder, they’re basically my crew chiefs, and they pretty much run the stable of this car, they treat this as a second job, putting in 30 to 40 hours a week.”
Steven Linder has been doing this a while. But the pairing of his family and Andrews is relatively new.
“I’ve been working on race cars for probably 22 years, and 20 of those were with my brother, Michael, when he raced,” Linder said. “And then I spent the last two seasons working with Craig Mintz, and then over the winter we decided to put a second team together, and Chris was our first choice.”
Linder also enjoys working at Attica Raceway Park.
“This place is clean, racer friendly,” he said. “There’s lots of room in the pits. The racing surface is very consistent. That means it’s driver-, mechanic-friendly. You can come to the racetrack and know that the preparation for the track is the same as the week previous. That’s hard for a racetrack to do that.”
‘It’s the next game or the next race …,’
Craig Mintz is competitive.
No, strike that.
Craig Mintz is ultra competitive,
He grew up around racing; his father Les drove in motor cross. But racing doesn’t define him. If you look for Mintz on a winter evening, you’ll find him not with a car, but in court.
A basketball court.
Mintz is an assistant girls basketball coach at Lakota High School.
And, yes, Mintz said he falls back on his driving to get through to his players.
“All the time,” Mintz said. “I try to let them know that we do this for fun, too, and we‘re good at it. Me being a younger coach, sometimes I need to (assure) them that I know what I’m doing, as far as building people around us and enjoying the sport. You have to enjoy the sport to be good at it. With racing and basketball, I try to mix those two together, and the girls come to my races; that’s kind of cool too.”
And what draws Mintz to racing is the same thing that drove him into sprint car driving: Competition.
“Anything from racing to (basketball) to Monopoly with my kids,” he said. “I love to win.”
But Mintz likes something else about the atmosphere at Attica Raceway Park: The community.
“A lot of people don’t realize how close-knit everyone is in the pits,” Mintz said. “If something goes wrong, someone gets hurt, someone gets a car torn up like last week, we had four or five teams down there putting us back together. And for kids to see that, and for my family to see other people care about us that much, to put a car together they’re going to go compete against as well. It’s huge.”
Later that night, Mintz, a two-time track champion, scored his first win of the season in Attica, taking the 410 sprint feature.