Mcmurray Speedway

Wow..........now this brings back ancient memories for me...

Back in the "first" oil boom days of the Alberta north. *chuckle*... gas was like 50 cents a GALLON and we all had Big Block Ford's and Chevy's in our trucks (all 4 x 4's with REAL WARN manual hubs, not today's crap auto junk) and mud stud High test tires (so named back in the day for Extra Old Stock 2/4's ($9 ea) cases of beer we'd pile box high out back) and head to McMurray Speedway to watch some really crazy dirt racing stuff happen... not that we would remember any of it - you try to remember anything after diving into 2/4's of the high test stuff @ 7.1% ... hell it's was a honky tonk kinda place back in the day. I swear, kids who picked up all the cans paid for their college tuition in full! And boy, that beer left one hell of an aftertaste.. it was worse than sticking yer nose up a tail pipe...I don't even know if it's even available anymore.

But don't ask me or anyone else that used to hang out there to remember anything, let alone how we drove out and back to Edmonton on a very late Sunday or if that far gone, Monday's at 4 AM :-)

I do recollect sometime during the summer of '78, one of my buddy's who just bought a brand new Lil'Dodge Ram Express Pickup with those Disco lookin exhaust stacks getting flipped upside down by all of us while he was passed out in the mud and then we put him under it, near the back. I remember the roar of him being freaked out when he woke up .. the stacks had of course collapsed and pile driven themselves into the mud while he was stuck inside the bed area of the box...

The track was a small clay oval (assuming it still is...) that always had a variety of events, demolishin derbies which were always the best part of going there and racing of course....

They used to say (at the time I didn't realize why) there was clay and then there was McMurray clay. The track could dry out real fast and there would be a A-Bomb plume of dust hanging over the speedway. That maybe exaggerated a wee bit, we were all kinda - you know - too busy drinkin the 'good' stuff.

So would this place be classified as a Ghost Track now or is someone going to bring it back to life?

I wish you good luck and good success! You would think with all the apartment bound roughnecks from all over Canada up there they would be looking for some non-standard entertainment.

You should go to this site http://www.motorsportscentral.com/default.asp and give the web master there any info you have on the track. This site is a great collection of information regarding Canadian tracks active and closed.