August 2, 1946. A quarter-mile semi-banked clay oval opens in northeast Amarillo.
This is three months after the end of World War II. The men who came home from that war came home wanting to go fast — wanting, in the specific way that people want things after surviving something terrible, to point themselves at something dangerous and push. Racing was everywhere in postwar America. Every flat county had a track. The Panhandle had this one.
The oval at East Hastings was not a great track, by the standards of great tracks. It was a quarter mile of packed caliche, semi-banked, rough enough that the cars drifted and slid and kicked up rooster tails of white dust that hung in the air long after the car that made them had already gone around again. What it was, was local — genuinely, specifically local in the way that only short-track racing can be. The drivers were from Amarillo. The mechanics were from Amarillo. The crowd knew everybody's name and knew whose car had been rebuilt from junked parts and whose father had driven this same track fifteen years ago and what happened to him.
In 1971, nine tracks across the country formed the National Championship Racing Association. The Amarillo track was one of the founding nine. G.W. Elkins of Amarillo was elected the first NCRA president. National sprint car talent came through here. Big purses. Big names. The kind of Friday nights that people describe thirty years later with a specific look in their eye.
The track changed hands. It got a new name — Randy's Speedbowl, after the owner who took it into its last decade. Randy Carthel ran it the way tracks get run when they are between eras: with enthusiasm and ambition and, eventually, with checks.
The checks started bouncing.
Drivers who won purses couldn't cash them. Vendors who sold equipment and concessions waited for payments that didn't come. The racing community is small and the Panhandle racing community is smaller and word moves fast in a world where everybody knows everybody's car by the sound of the engine.
The Speed Bowl has been dark since at least 2014.
The oval is still visible from the air. From street level, on East Hastings, you are looking at a fence line around a piece of land that used to shake every Friday night with sprint car engines and the specific noise that a quarter mile of clay makes when twenty cars go into the first turn together.
The Amarillo Area Motorsports Hall of Fame has the photographs. They have the programs from the big races, the autographed photos, the printed schedules with the purse amounts. The people who were there remember it.
The Carthel-era hot check story, with names, amounts, and outcomes from Potter County JP Court records. What the NCRA founding actually meant for this track. And what became of the Speedbowl property — Act Two.
[$0.99 · inkwell.wiki/speedbowl]
Next: One track died from bad checks. Another got taken by paperwork. The dragway is 8 miles southeast on Burlington Road. Look for the mark at the far end of the strip.