5/3/2025
Paducah International Raceway
Paducah Ready to Host ASCS National Tour
Sprint Car racing may be an uncommon spectacle in Kentucky, but one Bluegrass State track is set to host the American Sprint Car Series (ASCS) National Tour next weekend with preparations for the arrival of the best in the country.
When the National Tour makes its return to Paducah on Saturday May 10th in a Mother's Day Salute, it will be only the second show back this year since the flood halted local competition in early April.
Competition Director Steve Ariana recalls the massive amount of rain that fell from April 2–5. “I think the area around the track got somewhere between 15–16 inches of rain in four days,” Ariana said. “There was just too much water.”
When the storms passed, the racetrack was left with an estimated 15–18 feet of standing water from its lowest point in the infield, in addition to several feet in the pits and parking lot. Local flooding from the nearby Ohio River backed the water up in surrounding areas with nowhere to drain, which heavily affected the racetrack.
“There is a drainage canal that runs behind the track that was built a long time ago by the Army Corps of Engineers and it’s just filled up with a lot of silt and everything,” Ariana said. “When it gets full, it backs up through our drain in the center of the track, and that’s really what flooded us.”
Though not much can be done once high water levels occur, the racetrack has been through instances of flooding in the past and was able to prepare some beforehand that limited potential property damage.
“We got all the equipment out and moved that to higher ground,” Ariana said. “When the water came, obviously the track was flooded and the parking lot and pits, we had a pit building that floated off of its foundation. But everything else was pretty much protected.
“Once the pits went down, the parking lot went down in a couple of days, we were able to get out there and start trash cleanup, put the building back in place, check the power and make sure that was okay, check the scales and some other things. We really mitigated any kind of damage to the whole infrastructure. We just basically had to wait this time for the water to go down inside the track.”
“Adam [Elliot, track owner] has been out working the track yesterday and today,” Ariana said. “Yesterday was kind of clean-up, going out with the grader and the blade, scraping off the top level, skid steer picking up some of the branches and little rocks and stuff that floated down on the top. That’s all cleaned off now.
“Today, he’s seriously able to get out there and start doing some track work — disc it up, and then we’ll roll it in and get the regular pattern started on getting the track ready for the weekend.”
Don’t miss the ASCS National Tour in action at Paducah International Raceway next Saturday, May 10. Event Information and Tickets are available at www.paducahracing.com.
If you can’t make it to the track, stream every lap live on DIRTVision.
Article Credit: Jordan Delucia - ASCS
Submitted By: Brittany Elliott