Grand-Am Road Racing at Kansas Speedway

While Kansas City has had its share of professional racing at Kansas Speedway, the only thing missing was a professional road race series coming to town. With the recent addition of a 2.37-mile roval (road coarse plus oval) utilizing most of the speedway banking on top of the new infield layout, that problem has been solved.

Don’t let the empty rows of seating fool you. The infield and paddock areas were packed with fans who were able to get up close and personal with the cars and drivers.

The inaugural event at Kansas Speedway drew a nice crowd, and was a big hit with the fans as well as the drivers. Despite having just a 6-turn layout, which doesn't look like much on paper, most of the drivers seemed surprisingly pleased with the track. Gary Liefooghe, driver of the #81 Bimmerworld car that took first in ST at Road America a week prior, commented on how tough it was to find those last few tenths on the infield. That seemed to be a common theme in most driver conversations we had.

There seemed to be a good number of local car fans who may have been new to the Grand-Am series, or even road course racing at all for that matter, but it’s never hard to find fans of exotic cars, so the Lamborghini Super Trofeo support series garnered a lot of attention.

The site of a Lamborghini on air jacks is enough to make any car fan stop and stare, but it didn’t hurt that the #33 car was driven by 1976 Olympic decathlon gold medalist turned reality TV star Bruce Jenner and his son Burt.