Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Engine builder fills key gap at Volunteer
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Vic Hill has long been an engine builder and a Dirt Late Model driver. He never really planned to become a racetrack promoter as well.
But there happens to be a pretty famous dirt track just 2 miles down the road from his motor shop — the 4/10-mile, high-banked Volunteer Speedway in Bulls Gap, Tenn. — that Hill doesn’t want to see become another hotel, restaurant or gas station off a busy exit of Interstate 81. So here he now is, overseeing the operation of the facility and preparing for his most ambitious promotion yet with the running of April 14-18’s Gauntlet, an unsanctioned four-race, five-night Super Late Model event offering over $380,000 in purses and a $100,000 bonus if a driver who wins one of the three preliminary features also captures Saturday’s $30,000-to-win finale.
“I love the place,” Hill said. “I want to do what I can to keep it going.”
Hill, 61, of Mosheim, Tenn., is a fine fit to lead Volunteer. It’s his home track, of course, and as a driver he’s enjoyed plenty of success there, winning five Super Late Model championships from 1999-2009 and owning roughly 100 career victories. He also has been close for years with the track owners Joe and Phyllis Loven and in the mid-2010s even helped them promote some steel-head Late Model shows.
Come 2022, Hill essentially ended up promoting the track by default. The Lovens, who first bought Volunteer in 1998 before selling it in 2019 to Tennessee construction company owner Landon Stallard, regained ownership of the track in ’21. The couple were in their mid-80s, though, and not able to run the speedway themselves, so, when Hill received inquiries about the track’s status for ’22, he became the go-to guy.
“(Michael) Rigsby (DirtonDirt’s founder and the FloRacing general manager) called and said, ‘What’s going on with the track?’ I said, ‘I have no idea,’” Hill recalled. “He was wondering about running a race the week of Bristol (Motor Speedway’s NASCAR weekend), which was always kind of a tradition at this place, so I called Phyllis and I told her, ‘I said, ‘Look, Rigsby, FloRacing, they want to have a race,’ and she said, ‘Vic, we can’t deal with it. Tell them you own it.’ I was like, ‘Oh, wow.’ ”
Hill took the lead in working with Rigsby and FloRacing in running April 2022’s Kyle Larson Presents Late Model Challenge powered by Tezos. It was a learning experience for Hill.
“Well, at that point, I had no clue of what I was getting into,” Hill said. “So anyway, long story short, we did the race and I basically just leased the track to them and it was good. I mean, it packed it, it was great. I did the (track) prepping, the people (workers), the concessions, which was all new to me and what you had to manage and how you had to do it. I was like, ‘Holy smoke.’
“So that year, after that race, of course, the local people, everybody’s wanting to have a race. I think I had four races that year. The next year, people are like, ‘Oh, we want you to race more,’ and so I had the next year, we did a Flo (lease) race again (another Kyle Larson event that saw Larson outduel Jonathan Davenport in a memorable classic), we did that $100,000-to-win XR race, which was, again, I rented it, I’m not going to lose anything.”
Hill noted that he wasn’t “making a tremendous amount of money, but it’s not even my facility. I’m just making sure it’s here.” But he was also finding his way — “crawl, walk, run is what’s happened here,” he said. His modest ’24 schedule included an unsanctioned $50,000-to-win show in June. Last year he presented a limited number of events again topped in September by a FloRacing Night in America affair.
This season Hill is stepping up his promotional activity, scheduling 15 race dates including a World of Outlaws Late Model Series show (already completed last month), Oct. 22’s FloRacing Night in America program and, most notably, next week’s Gauntlet, a multiday blockbuster that Hill hopes can become the marquee event that carries Volunteer into the future. With a successful megarace anchoring the track’s annual schedule, Hill sees the possibility of buying the track with his wife, Christa, becoming a reality.
“I kind of see the light of the end of the tunnel and I’m proud of the racetrack,” Hill said. “You know, I’ve worked on the track (surface) more than the facility because I really don’t own the facility at this point, but I’ve got the racetrack where it's really racy and everybody likes it. So this year, we've got a Flo race at the end of the year, we had our Outlaw race. We've got some of Ray Cook’s (series) races in the middle of the year and some weekly shows. But it needs to have an annual event that is a marker, because this property here, just like a lot of racetracks — not all of them, but a lot of them — they’re on some property that’s pretty valuable, right? They’re building more hotels there (at the Volunteer exit), Cracker Barrels and stuff, and the property is more valuable than a racetrack.
“So Joe and Phyllis want it to be a racetrack. But I’ve said, there’s no way it generates enough money in a year … if I were making a payment on a $2 million piece of property, and running the way we’ve done it, I would be upside down like a clown. People on the outside don’t understand the equipment cost and just the upkeep of one of these places. Hell, it costs about 30-grand a year there just to maintain the property with property taxes and all that type of stuff without having a race, period.
“Yes, on a big event, you can make 50-, 60-grand. That’s all right if you have two of them a year that do that well — which I haven’t, I’ve had one— and then the rest of the year on the weekly shows, you make $3,000 (each night) or you break even or maybe you make $10,000 … let’s say you make $100,000 a year after we were said and done, you go, ‘Oh, wow, 100-grand.’ Well, yeah, but that’s not paying me a salary or my wife. And we got to buy a new grader; they’re $90,000 for a used one. You got to buy a skid steer. You gotta buy a water truck or you gotta upgrade this or upgrade that, so that's no money left. It's got to make like, money. And imagine if you’re paying a note on a $2 million piece of property. It would be impossible.
“So we’ve got our Flo race and it was successful ( last year),” he added. “We’ve got the Outlaw race; it was fine. But we need something that makes a big hit.”
Hill has structured the Gauntlet in a manner that he feels can be the financial winner he needs. That includes forming his own streaming entity, TheThrill.TV, to maximize the revenue he collect and put towards the four nights of high-dollar racing. His streaming deal will offer a pay-per-view price for each night of the Gauntlet or six- and 12-month subscriptions ($120/$225) that include the Gauntlet races, other events this season at Volunteer and special how-to, engine-related videos hosted by Hill. TheThrill.TV subscriptions also include a free entry into a Vic Hill Race Engines Sweepstakes that will award a new ROX motor to a winner randomly selected in August.
“I’ve said this to numerous people, the TV (streaming) part of this, this sport needs it because a lot of venues don’t hold enough people to pay a purse that it takes to (hire) the quality people to work there, because they’ve got to get paid too, right? Everything’s expensive,” Hill said. “And I understand that the (streaming) compensates for the people in the stands, weather, all that stuff.
“I’m not doing this to go out and say, ‘Hey, I want to stream races.’ I don’t want to do that. It’s the best way I can come up with in my brain to make this work. I’m 61 years old, and I love my engine business, I love this sport, and I love this racetrack. It’s 2 miles from me, and I'm doing it to try to keep this place going. It could be a premier place, but it needs some money spent on the facility.
“So we put together a deal to where it, I think the event, just from the pre-sales and the (streaming), we’re not gonna lose any money. If this (Gauntlet) generates something annually … that’s what I want to do, as an annual deal to where it doesn’t mess around with anybody, it’s just my own little deal. I still want to have everyone involved in this (racing over the entirety of the season) as far as the Flo and the Outlaws and Lucas Oil or whatever it might be, but I’ve got to have something to say, ‘OK, this is where I make my money. This is how I can afford to own this place.’
“I mean, if this ain’t generating something where you can say, ‘Hey, if I did this for three years, I could pay for the place, and not be worried about paying for it,’ then it’s not worth it,” he continued. “It’s like buying a house and fixing it up. You’re fixing this thing up because you want to be more proud. What I’m proud of is what I’ve done to the track (surface), which is mainly labor. I’ve bought a grader and I bought some stuff, but it’s mainly just work. I do all the track prep and work and grading and all that stuff. It really needs about a half-million dollars of money spent on upgrades (to the facility’s infrastructure), so, until I see it could generate enough money to do that, why would I do it? I don’t own it.”
Somehow there’s enough hours in the day for Hill to massage the Volunteer surface and handle all the other racetrack responsibilities while also operating his busy engine enterprise. Fortunately his motor shop is so close to the track and he has a veteran staff he can trust at the business.
“I’m on my phone constantly, but now one of the things I’ve done in my engine business, my claim to fame is designing cylinder heads and all that, and so we've got a good package and I’ve done it for a long time,” Hill said. “We’ve been in business here 26 years, but I’ve kept, like, the main nucleus of people, they’ve been with me forever. And then I’ve hired younger people that are working with us … I’ve got nine people total, so I can come in and communicate with Jason (Lawson) and he can tell me what customers want, and I’ll make a plan for them.
“And so, after this many years of working with them, they know what I expect and what the customer expects, so it’s made my life way easier. And I will say this, my guys, it isn’t a job for them. They enjoy it. We do cut up and fart around or whatever, but I mean, it’s like a family, and, as a business grows, you’ve got to have people like that or it can’t grow. You can only do so much, and all my guys that take as much pride as I do in these engines, which takes a lot of pressure off me to be able to concentrate on something over there at the track.”
Hill’s daily schedule will be especially full during the Gauntlet, which will be just that for him. He’s been working on the event “for eight months,” he said, doing some “old-school” promoting by visiting tracks to push the race and talking to potential drivers. He’s confident he’ll draw many of the top names in the sport during a silent stretch for both national tours, and he’s hoping to see three different winners to start the week — the Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday races pay $7,000-, $10,000 and $20,000-to-win over distances of 30, 40 and 50 laps — to build intrigue with a trio of drivers eligible for the $100,000 bonus in Saturday’s 60-lap finale.
“The bonus is very doable,” said Hill, who will field his own brand-new CVR Race Car in the Gauntlet for Jimmy Owens of Newport, Tenn. (Hill expects to race a handful of times himself this season). “I knew that when we put it out there, but I wanted it to be doable. That’s the excitement about this thing.”
Hill has set the week with just a single support class each night and plans to run the Super Late Model feature first to give fans of the headline class early checkered flags. He also has a “fun” off night on Thursday that includes a band and other activities at the track.
“I just want to have something where it’s an annual, fun event. It’s springtime here and it can rain, but the weather's warmed up, it’s been nice … it’s supposed to be in the 80s next week. I'm trying to create here something that’s our own little week while not competing with those other entities, because if you try to do it and compete with them, you're gonna lose, because they're already established. I just want to generate something that people anticipate and say, ‘Hey, man, we had a ball up there. The racing was great and we had a good time.’”
Is Hill excited? You bet he is.
“Man, I am. I really am,” Hill said. “I’ll be tired as hell and probably grouchy and everything by the end of it, but I’m definitely excited. And like I told everybody, good, bad or otherwise, I would say Sunday and Monday the following week, there won’t be a lot of things going on on my phone or anything for Vic. I’ll be ready for a little rest.”
