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Burghill man has racing in his blood
By Jordan Cohen
WARREN
Ron Novak is an encyclopedia of knowledge about Sharon Speedway. His parents owned the Hartford track from 1950 till 1981, and he grew up breathing the engine fumes, dirt, oil and asphalt of a track that has been a sports fixture of Trumbull County since 1931.
More than 50 of his fellow racing enthusiasts turned out Saturday morning at the National Packard Museum to hear the Burghill resident recount his life at the speedway in a presentation he called “Raised on Speed”–“the cars, not the drugs,” Novak said.
His speech is one of the highlights of the museum’s current exhibit dedicated to local auto-racing history, “Start Your Engines!”
Displaying numerous photos, some from as far back as the early 1930s, Novak took his audience on a time trip showing changes to the speedway and the evolution of the vehicles that raced on it.
“Sometimes there were only eight cars [running], but my parents kept plugging,” Novak said in recounting the early years. The growth of interest in stock car racing changed all that.
“We’d get 80 to 100 cars for a quarter-mile,” Novak said.
He produced a 1936 track program, which showed that the speedway kept a registered nurse on site in case any drivers were injured. In those days, no one, including the nurse, was concerned about the costs of her medical assistance.
“There is no charge for these services,” the program emphatically stated.
“There were always changes,” Novak said, recalling the conversion from dirt track to asphalt, which brought the advent of speedy super-modified cars. “They just flew around the track,” Novak said. “They were wild.”
“They could go at least 120 mph,” said Dale Miles of Lake Milton, vice president of the Twin-State Auto Racing Club.
When Novak asked the audience to help identify a driver in an early 1960s photo, one member knew immediately. “That’s Ray Edwards of Youngstown,” said Edwards’ son Gary, who is also a stock car driver. The younger Edwards, 58, has raced since 1977 and was track champion at Sharon Speedway in 2000.
The museum display includes six vintage racing vehicles, including a midget racer and a sprint car. The oldest of the vehicles, a 1937 Ford Coupe with a V8 engine, brings back memories of the early racing days of dirt tracks and “beat-up” vehicles representative of the infancy of stock car racing. On the coupe’s wheel is a welded bead to protect the tires from being shredded because of the closeness of the other cars speeding around the track.
“They had to do that because the cars used to rub each other,” said one onlooker.
In recent years, Sharon Speedway has returned to its dirt-track roots, and the asphalt is long gone. Track length has been reduced to three-eighths of a mile.
“Dirt racing has always been more popular, and asphalt tracks have been struggling because the faster the cars, the harder it is to pass,” Miles said. “It’s all about economics.”
The exhibit, the museum’s first dedicated to local racing, runs through Dec. 27.