Short Track Weekly: Virginia’s Southside Speedway Could Return as Soon as 2026

For the first time since 2019, fans cheered at Southside Speedway in Midlothian, Va., on Tuesday afternoon (March 11).

No, it wasn’t because there was a race was going on at “The Toughest Track in the South.” That hasn’t happened since before the track’s 2020 season was canceled due to COVID-19.

The facility hasn’t reopened since, but that’s going to change in the near future.

Hundreds of fans packed Southside’s infield Tuesday to see a press conference announcing the track’s return. So many fans, in fact, that the staff working the event became worried they would run out of lanyards to hand out at the sign-in table. Those supporters – some of which had been going to races at Southside for more than 50 years – cheered after nearly every sentence the speakers on the stage uttered. The crowd was just as excited as they had been in my last time out to the track in 2019, when NASCAR Hall of Famer Bobby Allison and Virginia racing legends signed autographs before the night’s events.

Among the government officials on the stage were two former drivers who were rivals in their days racing at the track. Lin O’Neill and Jeff Oakley now head up Competitive Racing Investments, LLC, the group that’s taking control of the speedway with the intention to revive racing.

CRI, along with investors Scott Banton and Josh Lief, have entered into a 20-year lease-to-own agreement with Chesterfield County. Chesterfield had previously purchased Southside following its closure.

“Man, I feel like I won the Daytona 500,” O’Neill told Frontstretch. “It’s better than the Daytona 500. I mean this is home, and now, between me and Jeff [Oakley], we get to give it back to all the future racers and the past racers. I’m looking forward to honoring the history and creating a new future.”

No reopening date was announced during Tuesday’s festivities, but O’Neill estimated it would be in 2026 or 2027. The reason for the long hiatus is the extent of work required to get the track’s amenities up to snuff. The track itself looks like it could hold a race tomorrow after pulling weeds. But the press box is ancient, the grandstands and flag stand are completely gone and there was a light pole that had fallen down across the infield.

Getting that all fixed up is a tall task, but the investment team has greater ambitions. It doesn’t want to just repair and replace amenities. The group wants to turn Southside into a much-nicer facility with far more use cases than just racing.

“We will develop this property for sports and fun that all of the residents of Chesterfield County will appreciate and love,” Oakley said. “The only thing that will look the same in the future as it is now is this one-third-of-a-mile bullring known as the ‘Toughest Short Track in the South.'”

Jim Ingle, chair of the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, was thrilled about the prospect.

“Imagine being able to come here for a kids’ [soccer] tournament and be able to come to a race and perhaps stay in a hotel across the street, or come here and eat at a fantastic restaurant that hopefully will open up,” Ingle envisioned. “The sky’s the limit for them, and we’re gonna work together with the board collectively to make sure they’re successful.”

The stages at which those parts of the plan come together could vary widely. O’Neill noted his team is working on a few different business models.

“One [model] is get it back like it was, a little bit better than what it was, and get it operating,” O’Neill said. “And then another business model is (asking), ‘What do we gotta do to spend to make it the Taj Mahal and give people the ‘wow’ factor when they come in the gate?’

“So we’re just kind of weighing out what’s gonna be the best way for us to do that. I like doing stuff where, maybe every couple of years, we do something kind of big, and that way everybody wants to come back and see what we got going on (that’s) new. But I want to get racing going back first.”

The next step after the announcement is to secure engineering permits. CRI doesn’t need a permit for the on-track action, but just about everything else requires approvals, from the sewage hookup to new grandstands and bathrooms.

“Everything has got to be approved by the county,” Oakley told Frontstretch. “So we go through a long list of paperwork and engineering for many months.”

One thing Southside lacked at the end of its previous run was a NASCAR sanction, but the investment team was adamant that they will pursue that. In fact, nearby Langley Speedway is helping with that process. That will help attract racers going for the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series national championship, as well as those vying for the Virginia state title.

As for what could happen in addition to the speedway’s traditional Friday night weekly races, the investment group has already had talks with the SMART Modified Tour, which O’Neill said is interested in racing there. O’Neill and Oakley also know people within the zMAX CARS Tour and plan on discussing prospective options.

What It Means

If all goes according to plan, having Southside not only back, but better than before, would mean a lot to an area with such rich racing history. It seemed like racing was dying in the Richmond area with Southside’s closure and Richmond Raceway losing a date, a wild prospect considering Richmond was in consideration to be the home of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. But now fans in the area have hope again, with potential to generate new fans down the road.

It’s also good that another historic short track won’t be lost after so many have shut down and either left to ruin or bulldozed in recent years. Instead of Southside’s history and memories being lost to time, they all got stirred up again at Tuesday’s announcement.

Southside celebrated 60 years of racing in 2019, and it’s a track that previously hosted four NASCAR Cup Series races, with Junior Johnson, Jimmy Pardue, Jim Paschal and Ned Jarrett winning. Allison used to race regularly at the bullring before he was a Cup superstar. It was the home track for the likes of Ray and Roy Hendrick, Tommy Ellis, Lennie Pond, Bill Dennis, Curtis Markham and so many more. In fact, the most recent event held at the track prior to Tuesday’s announcement was a memorial for Roy Hendrick in August 2024.

But arguably the most famous driver to come out of Southside is Chesterfield’s Denny Hamlin. Some of the biggest attendances the track had and most publicity it received was when it hosted the Denny Hamlin Short Track Showdown from 2008-10. Those events featured Hamlin, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano, Tony Stewart and other Cup drivers against local late model drivers in memorable short track battles. Busch won two out of the three races at Southside, while C.E. Falk claiming the last one.

After Southside closed down and Chesterfield County acquired it, Hamlin had talks with the county about reopening it and running it, but it ultimately never materialized.

“I reached out to Denny and showed him what I had, and it just never went anywhere,” O’Neill said.

Still, the door is wide open should Hamlin ever wish to return again.

“Definitely, we hope to have Denny’s race back here if he wants to do it,” O’Neill said. “I mean this is his home track too. And before Denny retires, he needs to win a race here, you know what I mean? So we gotta give him that opportunity.

“But nah, hopefully, he’ll come in and help us with some things. That would be really cool, to help us get it even better than it ever was.”

Southside’s Unlikely Hero

There was a time when the idea of O’Neill running Southside would’ve been a ludicrous idea.

Why? Because he was banned for life from the track in 2013.

“You don’t know what you missed until you don’t have it, and I missed it for seven years before anybody else got to miss it like me,” O’Neill said. “I definitely wanted this place to come back. It’s a passion for me. I knew my racing days (would) come to an end eventually, and what better thing to do than to have a racetrack.”

O’Neill joked that he needs to write a letter of reinstatement for his crew guys that got banned, adding that someone will need to write one for him as well.

But as soon as the track closed down, O’Neill went to work. He handpicked people he wanted in on the project and didn’t include investors he thought had ulterior motives for the racetrack.

“It’s called Save Southside Speedway, not build a new Southside Speedway,” O’Neill said.

And now, it’s only a matter of time before cars are racing again in Chesterfield County. It not only could rejuvenate a once great racing community, but it also makes this writer who grew up going to races at Southside and worked an early job as the camera operator there very happy.

Whenever opening night is, whether it’s 2026 or 2027, I will be there.