Bandimere Speedway is located in the foothills west of Denver, and opened in 1958, and it was originally built to help promote his auto parts store in Downtown Denver and keep his son from street racing and getting ticketed by police
John Jr., who grew up five blocks from Lakeside Amusement Park where he listened to stock cars racing on Lakeside’s oval on Sunday nights, had a penchant for driving fast cars fast, beginning with his first car, a 1953 flathead Ford with a McCulloch supercharger.
He graduated to a 1957 “Black Widow,” a mythical, fuel-injected, 315-horsepower, V8 that was an unauthorized-by-Chevrolet early NASCAR racer. John Jr was a good kid, an all-conference tight end and basketball and baseball player in high school but he “just kept getting tickets.”
He and his buddies would street race and a state patrolman named Red Hasty, whom John Jr. remembers to this day as “having it in for me,” kept writing him citations. That’s when John Sr. decided to build a drag strip in Morrison so that his son and his friends would have a place to learn about cars and safely race them off the street without getting busted.
Bandimere Speedway:
Bandimere hosted the first NHRA national event in Colorado, the NHRA Sports Nationals in 1978
Mopar has maintained its support of Bandimere for 27 years, the longest running sponsorship in motorsports.
One of two NHRA national event tracks to have an all-concrete race surface and 350-foot beyond the finish line.
Track resurfacing was completed in April 2008, and included more than 47,000 sq. ft. of new concrete to the racing surface and asphalt in the shut down area
Features a proprietary ‘Track Cooling System’ that is unique to drag racing. The cooling system lies in the concrete launch pad and circulates chilled water from a pair of 12,000 gallon underground tanks through more than 15,000 foot of lines. The cooled area is 345 feet long – 40 feet behind the starting line to 305 feet past the start with two phases to allow for gradient cooling. Surface reading show temperature reductions between 20-25 degrees
Memorial Day and Labor Day are reserved for the Pepsi High School Drags, an event that is close to John Jr.’s heart because of his own experience as a teenage scofflaw.
Participation in the high school drag days has steadily fallen from a high of 700 cars in the mid to late ’70s to 250 cars today.
Beginning with the patriarch John C. Bandimere – 14 Bandimeres have been involved in the operation of Bandimere Speedway over the past seven decades.
At 80, John Jr. is still involved https://www.facebook.com/BandimereSpeedway/
https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/colorado-auto-racing-brief-history
http://www.bandimere.com/about-us/track-facts
https://milehighsports.com/the-family-on-thunder-mountain/
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