Back in its heyday, the Super Chevy Show was overflowing with spectators and participants.
Over the last several years, the allure of celebrating one of the most beloved car brands in American history at the Super Chevy Show had lost its appeal.
The fading popularity of the Super Chevy Show under the direction of owner Roger Gustin had the attention of a handful of track owners across the country who host NHRA national events.
“I think the best way to explain it is that he (Gustin) got kind of at the place that a lot of people do, he got kind of tired,” said John Bandimere Jr., who owns Bandimere Speedway in Morrison, Colo. “He stopped doing the things that made the Super Chevy work. He stopped giving little goody bags to the participants when they came in and it seemed to be a situation where customers were always upset. When those kind of things came up, it was not the way we would handle our customer. The other side is that he (Gustin) struggled trying to come up with what kind of special show should he have? Should I run Pro Mods? Should I run Nitro Coupes? It just seemed like it (the Super Chevy Show) was starting to meltdown. We stopped having it because frankly we just could not get along and we figured we would just go ahead and start our own All-American Chevy deal and forget it.”
Back in its heyday, the Super Chevy Show was overflowing with spectators and participants.
Over the last several years, the allure of celebrating one of the most beloved car brands in American history at the Super Chevy Show had lost its appeal.
The fading popularity of the Super Chevy Show under the direction of owner Roger Gustin had the attention of a handful of track owners across the country who host NHRA national events.
“I think the best way to explain it is that he (Gustin) got kind of at the place that a lot of people do, he got kind of tired,” said John Bandimere Jr., who owns Bandimere Speedway in Morrison, Colo. “He stopped doing the things that made the Super Chevy work. He stopped giving little goody bags to the participants when they came in and it seemed to be a situation where customers were always upset. When those kind of things came up, it was not the way we would handle our customer. The other side is that he (Gustin) struggled trying to come up with what kind of special show should he have? Should I run Pro Mods? Should I run Nitro Coupes? It just seemed like it (the Super Chevy Show) was starting to meltdown. We stopped having it because frankly we just could not get along and we figured we would just go ahead and start our own All-American Chevy deal and forget it.”
Then, last fall Gustin put the word out he was selling the Super Chevy Show.
“Just prior to that we started doing some investigating,” Bandimere said. “When I say we, I mean there is a group of guys who all have national events with NHRA who have formed an organization called the American Promoters Association (APA).What we do is we get together once or twice a year and we talk about what we can do at our race tracks besides the NHRA national events. The NHRA national event is only here one weekend out of the year, and we have lots of other weekends. So, everybody has something going that works kind of good and we thought we could just share that back and forth and everybody could have a feel for it. Well, the Super Chevy Show came up in the conversation at one of our meetings and we thought maybe we ought to find ought how Super Chevy magazine feels about this, so we did. We had found out that Super Chevy magazine was not happy with it (the Super Chevy Show). We had one or two guys who pursued the situation and the next thing you know, we were talking about if we would could put toge
ther 10 tracks we could put the money together and buy this thing (the Stracuper Chevy Show). Then, we could take this thing and start a resurrection of it.”
In November of 2009, the SCSW Inc., a special group of track owners, which included Bandimere Jr., Bill Bader Jr., Charlie Allen and Lex Dudas, bought the Super Chevy Show from Gustin.
Under the new direction of SCSW Inc., the Super Chevy Show is back on track and is celebrating in 30th year this season at 10 different tracks.
The Super Chevy Show, which includes drag racing, a car show, swap meet, and used car corral among other things, has already stooped at the Strip in Las Vegas, Virginia Motorsports Park, Texas Motorplex, Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Ohio, Heartland Park in Topeka, Kan., and Maple Grove Raceway in Reading, Pa.
“It all isn’t roses,” Bandimere said. “It is difficult because you have 10 guys who all think a little bit different, but we’re in this for the long haul.”
This Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the Super Chevy Show is at Bandimere Speedway just outside of Denver.
“I think the Denver event this first year will kind of be middle of the road,” Bandimere said. “We look at the Super Chevy Show as being our August major event every year. I know we’re excited about this weekend.”
Following Bandimere, the Super Chevy Show concludes its season at Houston Raceway Park (Sept. 10-12), Bristol (Tenn.) Dragway (Sept. 24-26) and Firebird Raceway (Oct. 22-24) in Phoenix.
On July 16-18, Dudas put on one of the most successful Super Chevy shows to date at Maple Grove Raceway.
“When Roger (Gustin) took the Nitro Coupes to eighth-mile, that hurt us,” Dudas said. “Eighth-mile (racing) is not very popular in this area. We brought in a Pro Mod group and we ran Pro Mods on the quarter-mile and the fans reacted. We asked them how they liked this (quarter-mile) racing, compared to the eighth-mile and they just cheered. We also got a little more involved in the car show and I felt there needed to be an emphasis put on the Show-N-Shine, which is now called the Bowtie Boulevard. What I did there, was I brought in (NHRA legend) Bill Jenkins and he judged the Show-N-Shine cars. We had Grumpy’s picks and 10 of them got plaques and that went over real big.”
Dudas said Maple Grove being a partner in purchasing the Super Chevy Show made a lot of sense.
“The reason why we did it (bought the Super Chevy Show) is that we knew that it was a property that was distressed and we knew it had potential,” said Dudas, vice president and general manager at Maple Grove. “We felt if we could gather together as a group and buy the corporation that we could control our own destiny and bring the show back to where it needed to be. Maple Grove is fortunate enough to have a successful Super Chevy Show for years and it was in our best interest to get involved in this package and it has been a good move so far. We have gone through our growing pains, but we see the potential and the relationship we have with Super Chevy magazine is excellent and we feel that is going to help grow this series.”
Dudas says there are many ideas being bounced around to improve the Super Chevy show beyond this year.
“There is a lot in the thinking tank right now and there is stuff in the pipeline that’s going to be coming out that is going to raise the level of the series,” Dudas revealed. “This was a bigger project than we thought it was going to be. As ownership, we thought we were just going to buy this thing (the Super Chevy Show) and truck along. It’s going to take more effort on our part. We all realize we are going to have to do more work ourselves. We can’t leave it to outside sources. Now that we ran the Super Chevy Show (at Maple Grove) this year by ourselves, we see some areas that we are going to fix on our own for next year. We feel next year our event will grow and I think the whole series will grow next year.”
According to Dudas, the Super Chevy Show will likely remain at 10 events in 2011.
“That’s what we plan on doing for now,” Dudas said. “But, if a good host track comes along, we will entertain it. We do not want to grow too fast. The idea with this whole program is to protect the product that has been there for 30 years and grow the product. We want to find opportunities that we can use the other 51 weeks of the year when the NHRA is not here with a national event. We felt the Super Chevy Show was a property we all could springboard off of for other avenues that might open up to us down the road.”
