Geely, the largest independent automotive company in China, and its subsidiary Mitime have purchased Miller Motorsports Park for $20 million from Tooele County, Utah. This comes after the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies announced its intentions to drop the land lease for Miller Motorsports Park after the 10-year option to leave the original 99-year lease. Geely and Mitime intend to initially invest about $50 million in order to upgrade the track to Fdration Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) and Fdration Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM) in order to qualify the track for higher levels of motorsports events in automobile and motorcycle racing. Additionally, a 3/8-mile oval track, rallycross course, and possibly a drag strip will be added within the facility during the next few years to increase the flexibility of Miller Motorsports Park. Mitime will also bring their motorsports engineering and driver training program to Miller Motorsports Park to provide comprehensive educational and fabrication facilities for the growing motorsports market in China. Geely has also unveiled its new name for the facility, retitling Miller Motorsports Park as the Utah Motorsports Campus, which the National Auto Sport Association region in Utah showed on its Facebook page.

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The late Larry H. Miller, a media mogul, dealership tycoon, and avid motorsports fan opened the track in 2006 as a playground of sorts for himself and other Utah dealership owners, business partners, and friends. He wrote off the cost of the $100-million facility, and began hosting an array of racing series at the world class facility.

"Larry built the track and said 'here, don't worry about making the money back that I spent to build it, just make it work. '" John Gardner, Marketing Communications Manager of Miller Motorsports Park recalled. "So they didn't have to pay off the $100 million spent to build it."

It was known that the track became unprofitable in the later years, but Miller didn't seem to mind. However, when he passed away in 2009 the facility fell in the hands of the Miller family, who didn't have the same passion for the track that Larry had. When the 10-year option to leave the 99-year land lease early came due on October 31, 2015, the Miller family decided to end the lease and cut ties with the facility.

This announcement was a surprise to employees of Miller Motorsports Park and Tooele County commissioners, who were under the assumption that the Miller family was to meet with county commissioners for planned meeting on local tourism opportunities last May. At that point, Tooele County, where Miller Motorsports Park resides, became the interim owners of the facility while picking a new buyer.

Last July, bids on the property were due, and HOT ROD reported that it was known that there were just two viable bids for the property, and it turns out that Geely was one of those two.

Geely came into the fold with an interesting twist, and largely thanks to Miller Motorsports Park's original designer and general manager, Alan Wilson.

Wilson has been working with Mitime to design and build five racetracks in China, and during conversations with Mitime mentioned that Miller Motorsports Park had gone up for sale. This sparked Mitime's interest in the facility, who quickly found opportunity to import American motorsports knowledge and fabrication into China's budding racing community. Gardner told HOT ROD that part of the plan is to teach the Chinese teams how to design and build race cars, and ship out oval track and hill climb cars.

Mitime and Geely proposed massive updates into Miller Motorsports Park in order to attract FIA events such as F1 or World Endurance Championship; along with FIM, and other drag racing, circle track, and rallycross racing series.

The announcement comes on the heels of yesterday's comments made on local news channel KUTV by Andrew Cartwright, a land developer who lost the bid on Miller Motorsports Park, that suggested Geely intended to put a manufacturing facility on the property. Cartwright suggested that his plan to add condos, office space, and homes on the property was the winning choice. "We would keep the venue exactly the way it was: keep all the events, keep everything going; but it needed to be developed," said Cartwright, citing that commissioners told him that "they plan to put a manufacturing facility there." Rumors suggest, like the ill-fated Texas World Speedway, Cartwright's long-term plans meant an eventual demise to the track.