The Wayback Machine: The Springfield Mile

By Joe Berk

That photo above?  It’s the Springfield mile, with riders exiting Turn 4 at over 100 mph on their way up to 140 or so. These boys are really flying.  It is an incredible thing to see.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Two blogs back I wrote about the East Windsor half-mile dirt track, which has gone the way of the dodo bird.  The Springfield Mile is bigger and better and last I checked it’s still with us.  A dozen years ago I made the trek out to Illinois to watch the big boys (and a lady or two) mix it up and it was awesome.  I don’t know if this is accurate or if it’s more biker bullshit, but the guys claim the bikes hit 140 mph in the straights and maintain a cool 100 in the turns.  And “straights” is a relative term.  The track is basically a big oval, with the straights being less of a curve.  What’s nice about oval track racing, though, is you usually can see all the action all the time.  When you go to a grand prix type event, you get to see the bikes or the cars for just an instant when they scream past wherever you are.  Oval tracks are a better deal, I think.

We planned to ride to Springfield from So Cal, but just before it was wheels-in-the-wells time my good buddy Larry passed and I stayed for his funeral.  We flew instead and because that gave us a little bit more of our most precious commodity (time), we bopped around Springfield a bit more.  We visited Springfield’s Lincoln Museum and had a lot of fun getting there. I drove our rental car and we promptly got lost (it was in the pre-GPS era). We pulled alongside a police officer and he gave us directions. As soon as I pulled away, I asked my buds which way to go. “I don’t know,” they answered, “we weren’t listening…” Neither was I. We all had a good laugh over that one.

The Illinois State Fairgrounds has two tracks, one is a quarter-mile dirt oval and the other is the big mile track.  The quarter-mile races were awesome.  This racing, all by itself, would have been worth the trip out there.  I love watching the flat trackers.

The next day, we went to the 1-mile track on the other side of the State Fairgrounds.

I was really happy with these shots. I had my old Nikon D200 and a cheap lens (a 10-year old, mostly plastic, $139 Sigma 70-300). I zoomed out to 300 mm, set the ISO to 1000 for a very high shutter speed (even though it was a bright day), and the lens at f5.6 (the fastest the inexpensive Sigma would go at 300mm).  The camera’s autofocus wouldn’t keep up with the motorcycles at this speed, so I manually focused on Turn 2 and waited (but not for long) for the motorcycles to enter the viewfinder.  It was close enough for government work, freezing the 100-mph action for the photos you see above.

As you might expect, there were quite a few things happening off the track, too.  Johnsonville Brats had a huge tractor trailer onsite equipped with grills, and they were serving free grilled brat sandwiches.  It was a first for me, and it worked…I’ve been buying Johnsonville brats ever since.  There were hundreds of interesting motorcycles on display and a vintage World War II bomber orbiting the area.

So there you have it, along with a bit of advice from yours truly:  If you ever have an opportunity to see the Springfield Mile, go for it.  I had a great time and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

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