As the new year has started, so has news in the racing business.
Kathie Coulter has agreed to take over Boyd’s Speedway for the 2018 season. The announcement was made via press release around noon on Monday. In the release, Coulter will be leasing the speedway. Track owner David Duplissey and partner Dale McDowell will have no involvement in the operations of the 1/3-mile speedway located on the Georgia-Tennessee border.
McDowell announced several weeks ago that his brother, Shane McDowell, was moving their racing operation to Mooresburg, Tennessee to be near Scott Bloomquist’s shop. McDowell has run the Sweet-Bloomquist chassis the last two years. With that move, many competitors and fans questioned who will be involved in the Boyd’s Speedway operations with McDowell being located three hours from the speedway.
Coulter is the granddaughter of E.A. Boyd, the track’s founder. She also spent the second half of the 2017 as the speedway’s marketing director.
“Racing is something that I have always had a passion for,” Coulter added. “I have literally spent every weekend of my life at a race track. I have loved working with the drivers as well as the Chattanooga community. We had a few charity races and did some outreach and I would love to do more of that this year. There will be some changes coming and hopefully the racers and fans will be happy with the adjustments. I’m really honored to have this opportunity. There’s probably only a handful of women promoters around, and I’m humbled to join that very small group.”
Both Duplissey and McDowell plan to be away from the Chattanooga area frequently in 2018 which brought about the need to hand the keys to the facility to someone else.
“I’m proud to have found someone like Kathie with the heart for the sport to assume management and operations of the facility,” Duplissey said in the release. “I enjoy traveling and the constraints with the track limited that.”
McDowell, who races for his brother’s Shane McDowell Racing operation, plans to compete more often during the 2018 campaign. SMR owners Shane and Sara McDowell recently moved their team from the Welcome, NC campus of NASCAR’s Richard Childress Racing to Mooresburg, TN.
“I’m planning on doing more racing this year and this will certainly be a weight off my shoulders,” McDowell pointed out. “I’ll still be involved with the track rentals and having my schools at the track so that part isn’t changing. I’m excited to do more customer work with Shane and Sara relocating to Tennessee. I’ll be able to be at the shop more. I think this arrangement will benefit everyone involved.”
The first event at Boyd’s Speedway for 2018 will be the annual Cabin Fever race. The race will have a new date, details will be announced soon.
