Since we have showed you some cool indoor racing from the former Pontiac Silverdome the comments about other cool indoor racing venues have come flowing in. Phil Pakiela commented on an item and mentioned racing at the Grad Rapids Deltaplex. We decided to look into it and we found all kinds of awesome stuff. This place is small. It seats 5,000 and normally hosts stuff like hockey and basketball games. That being said, they definitely are not afraid to go racing in the little building and we have seen everything from midget cars on a banked track to hot rodded lawn mowers on concrete treated with Coke syrup. So yeah, we went with the lawn mowers on the concrete treated with Coke syrup. Why? This is a compelling racing video! The guy we ride on the helmet with passes the whole freaking field and wins the damned race. Oh, spoiler alert.
We know that the “lawn mower” side of this type of racing kind of falls into the “pro stock” levels of imagination to see what was a stock John Deere hammering the corners but we love it. They are basically go karts with a load of horsepower and a tall center of gravity. That’s not a knock, that is kind of a general assessment of what we are looking at here. They do haul ass, though!
We have seen these things raced on dirt but we did now know that they engaged in winter indoor combat. We’d pay whatever the entry fee is to check these things out. Good racing, a couple of beers in the stands, and some laughs you have an ideal night at the races. This video is a few years old but it never gets tired watching someone carve up a whole field of racers!
Sadly, this racing has been gone for some time, The 1/2 scale stock cars that raced inside of a hockey rink on a specially banked track were even more interesting. Qualifying speeds were about 60 mph! The DeltaPlex has been closed and sold. Really loved the races.