The home drivers' roll: the names the quarter-mile kept — the South Bend Motor Speedway roll as the record holds it, and the Granger roll the record does not

1946–2024 · South Bend Motor Speedway, Indiana 2 west of Mayflower Road, South Bend (boundary)

The track the drivers built: the South Bend Motor Speedway opened on Friday night, 23 August 1946, built over two years by the South Bend Auto Racing Association — Joe Kovatch and thirteen others, including the local drivers Charlie Van Acker and Charlie Szekendy. Some 8,000 fans saw Chicago's Ted Duncan, the fastest qualifier, win the opening 25-lap Class A feature from Bob Muhlke, Frank Burany and Gus Klingbiel; Klingbiel, a Wisconsin native, was the season's first champion. The operators in succession, at the strength the open record carries: the founding association; Van Acker as owner-operator after his driving days; Louis Freeburn and Mike Bird among its later owners and promoters — Bird owned it in 1987 when he shut it down over attendance and car counts, and a single October 1988 programme was run to keep the track "grandfathered"; a closure for weekly racing in 2007; the Brown family (Jennifer and Scott Brown), who bought it after three dark years, per an April 2011 South Bend Tribune account, and upgraded the plant; the Sauer family — brothers Kevin and Vernon Sauer, racers themselves, announced as buyers in December 2015, Kevin Sauer and his family owning it for the last eight years of its life. (One conflict prints whole: the trade and history record calls the track a quarter-mile banked paved oval; one racing database lists it as 0.375-mile. The quarter-mile is the track's own and the press's consistent measure.)

The roll, as names — not "many local drivers": the midget era's frontrunners Tony Bettenhausen and Johnnie Parsons (the 1950 Indianapolis 500 winner); early favourites Dick Good — "the man out here for many years" — Ebe Yoder and Bob Newton; two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Gordon Johncock and, in his quarter-midget and short-track years, Ryan Newman among the 500 winners who raced there; Denny Nyari, for whom it was the home track; the Byler brothers, Eldon and Dave; father and son Jim and Bobby Blount; Dave Roahrig; Kenny Fry; the Stremme family including David Stremme; nine-time track champion Rich Boal, who started there in 1986 as a high-school freshman and whose father Rick raced there and whose daughter Hailey is a third-generation driver; and the winners of the last night itself, below. The last lap: on the weekend of 25–26 May 2024 the track ran "The Last Lap," 120 entries strong, the oval sold to a buyer not keeping it a raceway; Kevin Sauer won the final 40-lap outlaw late model feature from Austin Woodcox and Corey Ryman, and Buddy Holt's win in the Hornets 15-lap D main, near 11 p.m. on the Saturday, closed some seventy-plus years of racing on the ground. As of November 2026 the speedway is not operating as a raceway.

The Granger share, and the named gap: no driver in the roll above, and no champion of the track, is identified in the open record as a Granger resident; nor did searches of the track's history record and the Tribune excerpts reached return a Granger name. But the full home roll — the weekly programmes and results columns across seventy-eight seasons — is not digitised in open sources, and a Granger-resident weekly racer is exactly the kind of name that lives only there. This row therefore closes as a named gap at its Granger end: the settling source is the South Bend Motor Speedway programme and results archive as printed in the South Bend Tribune's full run (History Museum / St. Joseph County Public Library newspaper collection), checked name by name against Granger addresses. The boundary roll itself is dug and printed above at the size the open record holds.

Sources:

1. SPEED SPORT (Stan Kalwasinski), "South Bend Motor Speedway's The Last Lap," published 27 May 2024 — opening night 23 August 1946, the builders, the first champion, the roll of racers, the owners named, the 1987–88 shutdown and grandfathering, the final night's winners; Performance Racing Industry news, 8 December 2015 (Sauer purchase; built 1946 for midget racing; 2007 closure; Brown purchase per the April 2011 Tribune account).