The year 2009 was a fine one to be an Emporia drag racer competing at Heartland Park Topeka.
Two locals, veteran Joe Smith and up-and-comer Troy Ross, each earned HPT championships when the track’s bracket racing season ended in October, adding to titles two other locals won the previous month. Smith won this year’s Super Pro championship and HPT’s King of the Track title, beating out the champions of the other divisions. The Super Pro title was the second for Smith, who’s been racing in that class since the late ’80s and won his first crown back in 1994. Ross, who turned 23 in October, won the E.T. Pro points championship at Heartland Park Topeka this year and was victorious in four out of seven finals at HPT.
“It was kind of surprising,” Smith said. “I missed the first points race of the year going to a livestock auction, so I really wasn’t looking to win the points deal. I was just going up there to go as many rounds as you could.”
Smith finished second in Super Pro three times in the intervening 15 years. He said the ’94 championship and this one were “two totally different deals.”
“The number of racers each weekend (back then) was a lot more, and we went a lot more back in the early ’90s,” he said. “I mean, we were going every weekend and traveling all over the Midwest to do that. They only had about, I want to say, maybe six points races, where this one had 12. When you only race six races at points racing, if you have one bad race, you’re pretty much out of it. Where, with a 12-race deal, everybody’s gonna have a bad race, and you can overcome that, gain the points.”
Winning the E.T. Pro championship represented a new pinnacle in Ross’ career after finishing as runner-up in that class in two of the past four years. Last season, he finished fifth.
“Last year, we had some problems with the car, with transmission trouble,” he said. “We still got a good race in, but we had some problems at certain races. And during the year last year, about half of the bracket races at Topeka got canceled. So that kind of contributed to not getting to go racing as much.
“Whereas this year, the car was underneath us the whole time. It was running great, and none of the races got canceled at Topeka. We got going early, and we just really used that confidence and just carried it on over, just kept going throughout the year like that.”
Ross also scored a finals victory in the CDRA Race of Champions in Tulsa, Okla., and finished in the semifinals out of 238 cars in the Division 5 E.T. competition, narrowly missing a trip to the world finals in Pomona, Calif.
Ross’ and Smith’s accomplishments weren’t the only ones at HPT this year for the Emporia drag racing community. Ross’ girlfriend, Lindsay Lippert, raced to a second-place finish in the Street class, and Luke Siebert, a good friend of Ross, finished third in Sportsman.
“So Emporia, we don’t have as many racers that go up there as Topeka or Kansas City, but we held our own this year,” Ross said.
Back in September, Emporia natives Josh Stevenson and Ryan Phillips won points championships in HPT’s Super Showdown Stock Car series. Stevenson won the Factory Stock championship, and Phillips won in Modified. Add all those successes to those accomplished on the national scene by local NASCAR driver Clint Bowyer and drag racer Gary Stinnett, and Emporia should have its share of natives winning on racing circuits in 2010 and beyond.
“Actually, (Emporia’s thriving) as a racing community in general,” Smith said. “Because you’ve got a lot of guys that run circle track. You take an interest in what the other guys are doing, too. It’s kind of neat. You always root for the locals. So it’s fun to watch the other guys, too.”
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