I saw on another board that the lease for LVD was sold to Gary Chimeri - the guy who drove Long Island Motorsports Park into the ground.

Anybody know if this is true or not?

 

Looks like it is true, I found this on the LVD web site:

Rather than get on the phone all afternoon I am doing a blast email. I just got off the phone with Tim Rafferty. Kyle Barletta called him this morning to tell him that the lease was sold to Gary Chimeri (the Long Island dragway guy). THIS IS NOT A RUMOR. Kyle and Glenn have been given two weeks to get their stuff out of there; they were informed that their services are no longer required. According to Tim, Chimeri will be calling the rest of the employees over the next few weeks and he has no idea if he still has a job.
William Horton
Personal Lines Manager
Stone Insurance Group
203 238 7400 x233

 

Well, let's see...

At first, he put some money into the track, made it look nice and had a lot of big events. As time went on, less and less money went into the track. It cost more to get in the gate, and the payouts became smaller and smaller. He lost NHRA affiliation after a while. He pissed off all of the Jr. Dragsters, so they all left. I heard that the Wallys that were available for the winnters of the NED "Wally Days" were in his home, never made available to the racers. I know of one guy who was the track champion a few years back, he was supposed to get a year's worth of free passes and a jacket, he never got anything.

After a while the track started to fall into disrepair, no more money was put into it. The concessions stand was shut down by the board of health. The bathrooms were disgusting, after a while they replaced them with port-a-potties and a roach coach. The track workers had a mop and a shopping cart at the starting line, if anybody oiled down the track you might as well pack up and go home, it'd take hours to clean up.

I saw a nice car crash up at the top end of the track. The track workers went up there with the (1) fire extenguisher and watched the car burn to the ground.

What else... Timing system hardly ever worked properly. The tower was burned down one year and replaced with a trailer. Towards the end, nobody even worked the starting line, it was done from the trailer. There were "combined eliminator" days (Heavy & Super), with 50 or more cars, the payout was minimal.

Some days they tried to have 5 or 6 classes, plus money runs, plus big events. All in 5 hours. Hardly ever finished any of the classes.

And of course, the time-only guys ruled. While all of the heavy or super racers were sitting in the lanes waiting to run eliminiations, the time-only cars would go round after round, making as many passes as they seemed to want.

It was a mess.

 

It looks like this deal is dead, and the old staff will be back running the track in 2005.

=D>

 

I saw something on the DRU site, and the promodified site that said that the deal fell through.