Summit Motorsports Park today is a drag racing showplace, home to the NHRA’s Summit Racing Equipment Nationals, the “Night Under Fire” and a host of other high-profile events. But the track that has become a model of entrepreneurial success began life far more modestly as just plain Norwalk Dragway.
Only through the hard work and dogged determination of the late Bill Bader Sr. did it become “the little track that could.”
In this episode of Legends, The Series, Bill Bader Jr. remembers the driving force that was his father, a man who, through hard work, vision and perseverance, transformed a cow pasture into a colossus, bought a sanctioning body and left a legacy that lives in perpetuity.
During the journey, we are introduced to the amazingly simple business plan that made success possible (1. Always do what you say you’re going to do; and 2. Always start on time) and we learn the transfer of power from one generation to the next wasn’t without its challenges.
The son of Lebanese immigrants who wanted him to be a doctor, Bill Sr. went through the motions but, ultimately, adopted a “jack of all trades” persona that led him to dabble in night club ownership, weight loss clinics, manufacturing and importing. He also was a round track racer of some reputation.
He bought the dragstrip in 1974 with zero knowledge of the sport. Initially, he was totally baffled by “breakouts.” According to his son, he succeeded in drag racing for the same reason he succeeded at everything else he tried.
“He would not be outworked,” he said of his father. “He led from the front and he expected everybody to approach their business the same way he approached it. Everything that was asked of him, he did.”
Three years after his death, his son remembers him as “the embodiment of the entrepreneur” and “the most persistent, determined and hard-working guy” he’s ever known.
