Vado Speedway Park opens for Father's Day weekend
EL PASO, Texas (KFOX14) — Stock car racing returns to the Borderland this Father's Day weekend.
And it comes in the way of a new racetrack in Vado, New Mexico.
"This place is state of the art," said Royal Jones, the president and founder of Vado Speedway Park. "There’s not many racetracks like this in the country maybe three in the country that are close to this nice in terms of the facility."
Rue Stone, the general manager at Vado Speedway Park, is a former driver who says the track has been under construction for more than two years.
"We closed El Paso Speedway Park in Sept. of 2016 and Southern New Mexico Speedway in Las Cruces, we closed that last fall," said Stone. "And then we opened this crown jewel that everyone is going to be happy to see tomorrow night."
Jones said: "This is a soft opening. Kind of a sneak preview. We’re not really ready. But we can’t keep putting it off. The only way to get something done is to just do it. It forces you to do things you wouldn’t do. We’ve got everybody going 300 miles per hour."
I asked them why they chose the small community of Vado as the home for this park.
"The reason we chose Vado is that me and the owner Royal Jones would drive back and forth when we had the El Paso Speedway," said Stone. "We would drive back and forth on a Friday evening and we would say, 'Man what if we built a track in between El Paso and Las Cruces.' Well, here we are.”
"It could be, not as nice as the stadium for baseball, but we’re kind of comparing to that and just using ideas that we’ve gotten from all over the country to make a really nice place where families can come and enjoy the races," said Jones. "And later on we’re going to do monster truck shows, tractor pulls, concerts, fights. There’s no limit to what we can do. We’re right here between El Paso and Las Cruces."
Stone said: "We have people that we’re employing here. They are from the town of Vado. Everyday I’m like a tour guide and trying to get stuff done at the same time. But you have to make things right for the people from here. They want to see what we’re doing and what they can do to help. Everyone is for us here in the town of Vado. And it’s going to boom this little town.”
Vado Speedway Park opens this weekend.
Races start tomorrow night at 7:45.
Tickets start at $12 and it's located off the Vado exit on I-10.
For more info click here.
