York County racer hopes to bring back lawn mower track

For more than a year, local lawn mower racers have been without a track to show off their miniature speedsters.

York County’s Phat Bottom Speedway, which once hosted hundreds of fans and racers on Saturdays, shut down permanently in the fall of 2014 when noise complaints from neighbors and a fight over the county’s zoning for the track off Jim McCarter Road ultimately forced the course to close.

Now, a former Phat Bottom racer is planning to start a new lawn mower track at a larger venue this spring.

Justin Parker of Lake Wylie, whose Kountry Kustoms team was once a regular at Phat Bottom when it operated between 2009 and 2014, has worked out an agreement with Carolina Speedway in Gaston County to host lawn mower races starting on Saturday, April 9.

A new lawn mower track will be laid out in the course’s infield, giving the racers an eighth-of-a-mile oval to rival the speedway for full-bodied race cars.

“There was a rumor that (Carolina Speedway owners) were going to do one in the infield,” said Parker, who called the owners about the idea. “They said they were not interested in running it themselves, so I asked if they’d lease it to me.”

Parker says the fans for lawn mower racing at Phat Bottom – which he remembers having “200 to 500 people there religiously” – will be itching to come see racing resume in the York County area. The speedway is little more than a mile over the state line on S.C. 274.

“There used to be five (tracks) in our area, and now it’s down to two,” said Parker, an industrial radiographer, counting tracks in North and South Carolina that local racers have to drive for hours to reach.

Other drivers who used to run lawn mowers at Phat Bottom also are looking forward to having another course in their backyard. They say a broad sense of community exists among lawn mower racers that is sometimes absent from the more heated world of car racing.

Even when rivalries exist, said Mark Ledford with Red Baron Racing, “at the end of the race we all go out to get dinner together.”

Andy Clabough of York, one of the Dreammakers race team, agreed. “If he was in a wreck, I’d be the first one over to help him.”

Both men have traveled as far as Maryland and Illinois to compete in mower races and have met others who have traveled even farther to compete in the national points championship sponsored by the U.S. Lawn Mower Racing Association (USLMRA). They keep multiple custom-made racing mowers to take out on the track on weekends, wherever the track lies.

“People think it’s going to be a grass-cutter,” Clabough said. “But when you see them get warmed up, you know this ain’t no lawn mower.”

Parker was a drag racer himself before he got into lawn mower racing.

“I never went to one. I thought lawn mower racing was kind of a joke,” he said. “I said, ‘I’m not going to no redneck lawn mower race’... then I went, and two weeks later I had my own lawn mower.”

He hopes to schedule a points race with the USLMRA for Carolina Speedway sometime this year. Otherwise, he plans to sponsor races there under his own Carolina Mower Racing Association.

Parker hopes to have a “kid-friendly” atmosphere similar to Phat Bottom’s, hosting go-cart races, young drivers’ divisions and races for mini-late-model cars – “Everything they used to do that made Phat Bottom special,” Parker said. The speedway should run races twice a month, and Parker may even organize some exhibition races to run in between Friday night auto races at the course to boost interest.

“I’m working 40 or 60 hours a week on this,” Parker said. “I’ll pay out of my own pocket because I believe this will be successful. ... It will give us a safe haven where we can race without the police coming to shut us down.”

This story was originally published February 28, 2016 at 7:25 PM with the headline "York County racer hopes to bring back lawn mower track."