NHRA Drag Racing Done in Denver After 2023 Mile-High Nationals? Don’t Believe It

• According to an article the Denver Post published Wednesday, Bandimere Speedway owners plan to build not far away a new dragstrip that could open in 2025.

• Top Fuel team owner Antron Brown, a three-time winner at Denver, predicted months ago that the Rocky Mountain market won’t disappear from the NHRA’s schedule.

• ‘We really feel comfortable with why we’re leaving: We need more space,’ owner John Bandimere Jr. says.

Call Antron Brown a prophet.

At the least, the three-time NHRA Top Fuel champion and team owner is an astute businessman.

Amid all the mourning for the Morrison, Colo., racetrack known as Thunder Mountain since the news of its impending sale, Brown predicted this weekend’s final Dodge Power Brokers Mile-High Nationals won’t be the series’ last race in the Denver market.

And Kyle Newman’s article in Wednesday’s edition of the Denver Post confirmed that.

Brown simply would say his theory was a no-brainer.

“That market is way too stellar not to have a race there, the three-time Denver winner and five-time runner-up both in a dragster and on a Pro Stock Motorcycle, said. “I think that you'll see a track back there way sooner.” Brown said the Bandimere family and all local government officials have been working together, “full-blown with the wheels turning and going to create and to have something there in the near future—very, very soon.

"Drag racing in Denver, Colorado, is huge. They have all the people and all the powers that be around them willing to dig in and help, because they know how big (an economic boost the track is to the community). Bandimere Speedway probably brings in anywhere, if I had to guesstimate, between $40-50 million in revenue for Denver, when the NHRA comes to town.”

NHRA fans have seen four dragstrips disappear from the landscape since 2018, Virginia Motorsports Park opt out of the Camping World Drag Racing Series, and Route 66 Raceway, near Chicago, drop off the schedule for several years and come back this May. Gone are Old Bridge Township Raceway Park at Englishtown, N.J.; Atlanta Dragway at Commerce, Ga.; and Houston Raceway Park at Baytown, Texas.

Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park, near Phoenix, hosted what it called its last Arizona Nationals this March, but if rumors have any hint of truth, it might not have seen its final event. So word that the Bandimere family is selling its property hit particularly hard.

But racetrack owner John Bandimere Jr. told Denver Post reporter Newman, “Everybody thinks that we’re being pushed out by houses. Of course, there’s no question they’re building a lot of houses around us. But that’s not why we’re leaving. We really feel comfortable with why we’re leaving: We need more space.”

Bandimere didn’t name the new owner of the land but did say that if the deal that’s in play is finalized, “I want the people to understand that the use of this property in the days to come really won’t be any different than what it’s been for 65 years, because there definitely will be vehicles here. You look over here to the mountain, and you see trucks and trailers and campers, you name it. It will be very similar to that.” Moreover, he said, “We have a backup offer” but that “everything is moving along in a timely fashion.”

While Bandimere acknowledged that “there’s no question—this will be the last year here,” he gave drag-racing fans the promise of a brand-new facility, which would be the first for the NHRA tour since the late Bruton Smith opened zMAX Dragway at Concord, N.C., in 2008. The target date for that to be operational is 2025, according to the article.

Newman wrote that the Bandimeres, who have made 100 useable acres work for nearly seven decades, since 1958, are “looking at two different sites near DIA (Denver International Airport), where Bandimere said the plan is to build on around 1,100 acres.” He quoted Bandimere as saying, “Most (racing) facilities need about 350 acres. Consequently, we haven’t had any room for parking. We’ve been renting our neighbors’ lots for parking, and they’re under contract to sell also, because there’s so much development happening in the valley.

“We’ve been looking for a long time,” Bandimere told Newman, “and we feel now is the time to be proactive, rather than reactive. It’s been 65 years of no water, no sewer out here. We haul water in, and we haul stuff out. It’d be really nice to have a facility where you can invite mom and the kids to come out and have a real restroom.”

He also told Newman that he’s planning for the new venue to include a karting track, and maybe a road course for sports-car enthusiasts, garages for individual auto storage/work, and industrial buildings on the property’s edge” – much like the in-progress plan for Pacific Raceways, near Seattle. That way the facility won’t become another victim of urban sprawl.

This new vision of Bandimere’s won’t be able to draft off the unique topography of the current track and might not even carry the family name. Another twist includes outside investors, leading John “Sporty” Bandimere III, John Jr.’s son, to remark, “Racing is what we do, but it’s not who we are. Whether we own the new facility or not really doesn’t matter to us. We want a place for this [racing] community to go—to watch events, to compete in events, to be a part of it.”

Citing pioneering track-prep equipment and a cooling system for the first few hundred feet of the racing surface, Brown said, “That track's always been at the forefront of drag racing” and “the whole Bandimere family is very passionate and has never changed.”

Nevertheless, change is coming to the drag-racing scene at Denver. And it isn’t bad news.

Qualifying for the Dodge Power Brokers Mile-High Nationals, marking the end of the longest-running active event or race sponsorship in all of motorsports, will take place Friday and Saturday. Eliminations are set for Sunday (4 p.m. ET, FOX).