D.I. COLUMNIST
On the Road
with Van Abernethy
S
hadyside Dragway is a fascinating place for many reasons, not the least of which is
the eye-catching 1968 Corvette that
serves as the most unique entrance
sign you’ll likely ever see at a drag
strip! Before it became Shadyside’s
signage, though, the ‘Vette was
owned by local racer Phil Looper,
who crashed it some 20 years ago.
After the mishap Looper telephoned
Shadyside owner Ronnie Buff to see
if he might want to buy the car, since
Buff was known as something of a
Corvette enthusiast.
“I told Phil I didn’t reckon I wanted to buy it,” Buff remembers telling
him. That’s when Looper made him
an attractive counter offer. “Phil says
to me, ‘Tell you what, if you’ll turn
the car into a sign I’ll just give it
to you!’” Buff says he could hardly
pass up such an offer, so two decades
later the Corvette is still welcoming
visitors to Shadyside from its perch
atop six wooden beams hammered
into the ground at the entrance
gate.
To plenty of racers and fans,
this little eighth-mile honkytonk is the crown jewel of outlaw tracks; a small-town drag
strip nestled at the foot of a
rolling hillside in Shelby, North
Carolina, that’s never once been
sanctioned since opening day
in 1958.
I especially enjoy hearing Buff narrate his fondest
memories tracing all the way
back to when the track was
nothing more than a strip of
red dirt. The year was 1960
when Ronnie and his dad first
started coming to Shadyside.
His father, Garland Buff, drove
the family’s ‘57 Chevy wagon to
the track with a 1948 Austin in
tow behind the Bel Air. Two years
later, when Ronnie turned 12 years
old, his daddy actually let him race
the wagon!
The track was beyond humble in
those days with only railroad ties for
guardrails. “Those were some fun
times on dirt and I don’t think Shadyside was even paved until maybe
1964,” Ronnie recalls.
The father-and-son Buff duo
continued going to Shadyside all
through the 1960s and ‘70s, when
one day out of the clear
blue Ronnie decided he
wanted to buy the track.
Brothers Marshall and
Travis Hambrick were
the original builders of
Shadyside and still owned
it in 1980 when Ronnie
first took an interest. “I
said to Marshall, ‘If you’ll sell me
this old track I’ll fix it up,’” Ronnie
remembers. Marshall agreed on
the spot and Ronnie went straight
home to tell his dad. Garland Buff
couldn’t believe his ears and asked
Ronnie if he was really serious. “I
told dad that I was definitely buying
it ... I told him how me and Marshall shook hands and everything,”
chuckles Ronnie, who remarkably
even talked his dad into be coming
a partner in the deal.
Even before the paperwork was
signed, Ronnie and his young wife,
Gail, started coming out to the track
to clean it up. “There were glass bot-
it still didn’t even have a
timing system. The pits
and spectator area was
just one giant hillside,
and while it was a scenic
piece of land you couldn’t
park many race cars on it,
so Ronnie wore out his
daddy’s bulldozer cutting the hills and sectioning off the
pits in layers. After tireless months
of outdoor labor, Ronnie held his
grand opening in late in April that
year and he recalls an overwhelming
turnout. “I charged $5 at the gate
and made $3,200 on opening day,”
he marvels. “I was on Cloud 9; I’d
never made that kind of money in
my life!”
In 1982, Buff performed his first
major update when he repaved the
track and widened it from an extremely narrow 28 feet to 40 feet
across. He also more than quadrupled the amount of concrete
for the launch pad. He continued
tles everywhere; we must’ve hauled
off several truck loads,” Ronnie says,
relaying that back in those days Shadyside didn’t even have gates to keep
people out on non-race days, so it
was common for them to meet at
the track during the week and hold
impromptu races and throw bottles
everywhere—no doubt with Lynyrd
Skynyrd blaring from their 8-track
players!
When Ronnie bought the place in
1980, the track was so backwoods
making updates here and there as
finances would allow. Then, for the
track’s 50th anniversary in 2008,
Buff went wild and ripped up the
entire track and poured brand-new
concrete from end to end. He also
widened it yet again; this time to
51 feet and installed concrete barriers. The most notable change of
all, however, was completed just
last year when Buff straightened
the famous curve in the shut down
area. For those of you who never got
to see it, the shut down area had a
no-kidding curve in it—a bend that
would bank to the left and eventually become so sharp that the cars
would go completely out of sight as
they rounded the turn!
Even before the crescent was
straightened though, I personally
witnessed cars that have clocked
190-plus mph, but it was understood there was simply no room
for error and the parachutes had
to deploy the instant you were crossing the finish line—or else you might
not be able to navigate the shutdown
area! “For years I had a dream of
seeing someone clock 200 miles per
hour at Shadyside, but I knew I was
going to have to straighten the shutdown before that happened,” Buff
explains. So in 2013, earth moving
commenced in a project that lasted
two years and cost $200,000 to
make the track completely straight
all the way to a brand-new sand pit.
Late last season Buff witnessed
his dream fulfilled, when on
a cool November day, PDRA
star Todd Tutterow uncorked
Shadyside’s first ever 200-mph
run … followed by five more
consecutive 200-plus passes,
the fastest being 203 mph! “I
was literally jumping up and
down with joy,” says Buff, who
regards that milestone as the
most unforgettable day in
36 years of owning the track.
“Watching ‘King Tut’ run 200
was worth every nickel it took
to straighten the curve in the
shutdown!”
These days, Ronnie will entertain you with stories from
the good ol’ days, but even
more enjoys talking about his
“grand babies” (as he lovingly
refers to them) and how they’ll
someday take over the track where
his own son, Lennie, grew up. “My
grand babies will inherit this place
and I’ve already told them they better not ever sell it.”
He feels the same way about that
old ‘Vette that sits on the wooden
beams at the entrance gate off Honey Haven Farm Road. “There’s been
plenty of people over the years who
have wanted to buy it, but much like
the track itself, my sign isn’t for sale
either!”
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54 | D r a g
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
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Issue 109