The roar of the engines will soon be heard again at Dead Horse Creek Speedway, and the Valley Motorsports Association is excited to get racing underway again at the track west of Morden.
President Chris Unrau said they are excited to be more established now and ready to grow and move forward after the association formed in 2023 and took over operation of the former ALH Motor Speedway.
“Going into our third season, it’s starting to feel a little more routine,” he said. “It’s not quite as new anymore, so we’re starting to figure a few more things out now.
“It’s exciting to go into a year that way where we don’t have so much development work to do, and now we can focus on what we have and making it all even better.”
A lot of their initial efforts were focused on revitalizing the track, starting with reshaping and resurfacing it, but there are always improvements that can be made every year, including planning more events this year.
“It’s something we can do incrementally,” Unrau said. “In the beginning, it was such a huge undertaking to get this thing up and running again and get it going. Now, we’ve got the opportunity to just incrementally continually improve it.
“There’s always improvements going on around the facility, and we’ve already got some of that underway this year,” he continued. “The big one for us this year is Morden Home Hardware stepped up and donated all the materials for a new concession booth, so we’ve got construction underway for that now.”
“The other one is we’re excited about bringing a class back to the speedway to race which will help the younger crowd get involved,” he said in reference to a class called slingshots, which are basically smaller cars geared for kids. “It’s a safe form of racing. It gets them introduced to the sport. It teaches them all sorts of skills … it gets families involved, and it’s just a really neat idea to get the young ones into it.”
Unrau was especially excited about having added to the schedule with the expectation that an event or two could possibly be rained out.
“We wanted to grow out our events a little bit as far as being able to round out the summer a little more,” he said. “We wanted to build a little more capacity and a little more flexibility into our schedule.”
Racing kicks off May 23-24 with the McNaught Cadillac Cup. That’s followed by a Father’s Day weekend event June 20-21. Next will be the GVE-sponsored Deere Run July 4-5 then the Summer Showdown July 18-19, and the Proven Seed King of the Corn Aug. 22-23 to coincide with the Morden Corn and Apple Festival.
“The big deal for that one this year is we’ve got the NLRA [Northern Late Model Racing Association] coming,” said Unrau. “That’s a touring series made up of very highly competitive late models out of the northern U.S. and southern Manitoba. That’s going to be a huge event to close out the summer.”
They have also tentatively planned an event for September that will run if they have had earlier cancellations in the season.
Unrau feels they have built a strong base of support in the area.
“We’ve had some really, really positive feedback from the community. All three of our major sponsors from last year immediately signed back up … and we’ve got more. It tells me that the businesses are seeing value in it,” he said.
“We’re getting great engagement from racers and fans on social media … and the community as a whole is stepping up to volunteer and help out.”
More information about upcoming races is available online at www.deadhorsecreekspeedway.ca.
