Some sports history will be made this weekend in Henry County.
For those of you who aren’t into the glories of “trading paint,” as some refer to auto racing, the details might seem incomprehensible but bear with us.
An IMSA MX-5 Cup race, normally run on winding “road courses,” will be run on an oval track for the first time — and not just any oval track, but the oval track at the Martinsville Speedway that’s so short and tight it’s often nicknamed “the paper clip.”
Here’s all you need to know: This is something that’s just not done. But it will be done.
Among those behind the wheels for this exhibition race will be a long list of up-and-coming drivers whose names mean something to racing fans if not necessarily the general public. The recently crowned series champion Gresham Wagner. Rookie of the Year Westin Workman. Former champion Tom Long. Mazda MX-5 Cup Scholarship Winner Sally Mott who says her goal is to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. All you need to know is that it’s a long and impressive list.
You also need to know this: Lining up in the grid in the No. 99 car will be someone that fans of racing at that level have never heard of. His name is Capers Zentmeyer. People in Martinsville might know him better as one of their local chiropractors.
It started with a mouse
How a Martinsville doctor has wound up racing in that event is a story that begins with a mouse — the rodent kind, not the computer kind — and involves a complicated mix of politics and nostalgia.
About four years ago, two buddies were at a condo in Wintergreen for the weekend. So was a mouse. The men started chasing the mouse, with little success, but their pursuit of the unwelcome rodent somehow led to a spirited conversation about how they ought to team up to pursue something else they were both interested in: Auto racing. Specifically, racing at the old short tracks that are scattered across the countryside well beyond the bright lights of NASCAR.
These were also two men who were in position to act on that dream. One of them was Hermie Sadler, a former NASCAR driver (and later Fox motorsports commentator) from Emporia. The other was Bill Stanley, an attorney and Republican state senator from Franklin County.
Politically, the duo is known for their legal challenge to the state’s ban on so-called electronic “skill games” — Stanley represented Sadler in a lawsuit that’s still winding through the courts. Others might know them for their podcast that mixes politics and racing: “Leaning Right and Turning Left.” Or, perhaps, Stanley’s support for Sadler’s unsuccessful run last year for the state Senate.
What is less well known is a partnership that goes deeper than that: They own the Sadler-Stanley racing team that for the past three years has been running races on short tracks from New Hampshire to the Carolinas, sometimes with young drivers, sometimes with semi-retired NASCAR greats such as Bobby Labonte.
Here’s how passionate Stanley is about racing. Last week, Gov. Glenn Youngkin was in Roanoke to talk to local law enforcement about how violent crime is going down. Just about every Republican legislator in the region was there with him. Afterwards, Stanley came up to me and said he had a hot news tip to give me. I thought it would be about politics. No, it was about auto racing.
This is more of a hobby than a money-making endeavor. Stanley jokes that the best way to make a million dollars in racing is to start with $10 million. Still, their venture has been a successful one in sporting terms: One of their drivers, 18-year-old Luke Baldwin from North Carolina, recently won the SMART Modified Tour championship. Drivers race for ownership teams (in this case Sadler-Stanley) and those cars have corporate sponsors, whose names are prominently displayed on the vehicles.
When I tell you who the corporate sponsor is for the Sadler-Stanley cars, you won’t be surprised: Pace-O-Matic, a company that makes those electronic skill games.
Worries about the future of small tracks and the future of racing
Once Stanley starts talking about skill games, it’s hard to get him to stop. (Trust me, I’ve tried.) Critics call the games nothing more than “neighborhood slot machines” that ought to be outlawed. Stanley sees them as a way for small businesses to get a piece of the state’s gaming action. Casinos have no use for these machines and Stanley has no use for the casinos. The casinos think these game operators are trying to get away with not having to follow the same regulations they do; Stanley sees the casinos as trying to hog the gaming space for themselves. We will not resolve this today. The General Assembly tried earlier this year and didn’t resolve it, either. The games remain banned, but also still present among us as operators try to find a way around the law. The only thing certain is that this issue will be back before the legislature in 2025.
There’s something else that Stanley is passionate about, too, and that’s auto racing. “When I was younger, I was handing my dad wrenches,” he says. “I was a gearhead.” He also lives in Franklin County, “the Moonshine Capital of the World.” Some in the county shy away from that sobriquet, because they don’t think it presents the county in the best light. Stanley doesn’t just embrace it, he expounds upon it. It was moonshiners who invented auto racing, he points out, which means his county gets to claim it helped invent a sport.
“How many sports originated in Virginia?” he asks. “It’s moonshine — the whole history of racing comes from running moonshine to North Carolina. They came out to test their cars, to test their mettle from out-running revenuers.” Then he comes to the part that troubles him: “We’re at risk of losing it.”
The “it” in this case is local, short-track racing, what might be called the minor leagues of racing. NASCAR started out on those short tracks. As the sport has grown, those short tracks have been left behind, much like teams in other sports moving to bigger, more lucrative cities. In the case of NASCAR, it first expanded nationwide, adding races in bigger, more non-traditional markets such as Chicago, Kansas City and Las Vegas. Other sports can expand to whatever size they want, but racing can’t: There are only so many racing weekends to go around. That means as new tracks get added, others have to be discarded. At first, that meant places such as North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a historic track that NASCAR abandoned as too small after the 1996 season. Next year NASCAR’s highest division will hold its first-ever race in Mexico City. To make room for that on the schedule, the Richmond Raceway will lose one of its two races. Politicians complain when jobs get exported to Mexico; where were the complaints when it was announced that Richmond’s tourism dollars will get turned into pesos?
Somehow, through all this turmoil, Martinsville has been able to hold onto to not just one but two races a year. The Martinsville Speedway stands in the racing world as a quaint reminder of what racing used to be: In football terms, Martinsville is the Green Bay of racing.
Stanley worries about that. The Martinsville Speedway is the only track that’s beeen on the circuit since NASCAR was founded in 1948, but there are no guarantees in sports. “As they expand across international lines, Martinsville is always in danger of losing a race,” Stanley says. He also worries about all the other small tracks across Virginia, many of which are no longer there. The Starkey Speedway in Roanoke County once hosted NASCAR races with the likes of Curtis Turner and Junior Johnson. It closed in 1966 and is now a park. The Old Dominion Speedway near Manassas closed in 2012. He sees this as a vital part of Virginia’s heritage and points out that there’s now a Virginia Motorsports Heritage Trail to celebrate small tracks in much the same way that the Crooked Road heritage music trail does for old-time music.
Stanley also worries that technological changes will cut racing off from a younger generation of fans. Once, “gearheads” like him grew up working on cars. Now, cars have been computerized and instead of spending Saturdays in a garage, kids spend their time playing video games. “So you have an older set of race fans,” he says, “but you also have a disconnect from where it started.” Once, a race at the local speedway was “a community race, with a guy who ran shine or worked in a factory — you came out to see him.” Now, as racing has professionalized, those connections have been lost. Stanley worries what that might do to the sport’s fan base.
In response, he’s made it his mission to make sure the sport stays alive in small town Virginia, which means making sure the short tracks stay alive. “These are the historic places,” he says. “If the pit wall could talk, the stories they could tell, and we’re at risk of losing ’em.” He introduced a bill — now law — that allows local governments to grant tax breaks to historic racetracks on the theory that they generate tourism revenue. How many have taken advantage of that? “Hell, I don’t know if half of ’em know I did it,” he says.
He’s also looked for ways to put his political expertise to work in the racing world. Ever wonder why you now get text messages from political campaigns? It’s because they buy up phone numbers and, with the help of a lot of databases, try to match that up with other market information that’s available. Take Facebook: It knows everything you’re interested in. If you’re a member of a lot of groups interested in, say, firearms or hunting, Republicans would like to find you and encourage you to vote for them. If you’re a member of a lot of environmental pages, then Democrats might be calling you. Stanley has tried to apply those same techniques to racing. Earlier this year, he used those kinds of databases to find the phone numbers of people within an 80-mile radius of South Boston whose market profiles suggested they be interested in racing. They got a text message chatting up an upcoming race at the speedway there. It was a sell-out.
On Palm Sunday.
“After they went to church, they went to the other cathedral,” Stanley says. The Sadler-Stanley racing team had two drivers in that race. Luke Baldwin finished first, Jonathan Cash fourth.
When Stanley came up to me at the Youngkin event last week, he wanted to talk about a different driver, though. He wanted to talk about “Beef.”
A quick rise on the weekend racing circuit
Capers Zentmeyer grew up in Martinsville — and also at racetracks up and down the East Coast that his father took him to as a child. “I fell in love with motorsports as a kid,” he says. It wasn’t until a few years ago, though, that he thought about doing more than just watching. He decided he would try to race.
By day Zentmeyer is a chiropractor. “When I’m at the office, it’s all business,” he says. “But as soon as the office doors close, it’s nothing but racing, baby.”
A few years ago, he bought his first race car — a 1996 NA8 Mazda Miata. “It was a piece of junk that was really run down,” he says. He fixed it up and started racing in 2022 but “didn’t do too well the first couple of races. I had a lot to learn. I thought I could jump in and kick everybody’s tail.” He did not.
Now he’s got a 1999 Mazda Miata NB (all these things mean something to race fans) and has apparently learned quite a lot. Last year, he ran 31 races and won 24 of them. The level he races at doesn’t get a lot of attention, but he has attracted some in the motorsports press:
“Three wins in Spec Miata for Zentmeyer at Brady Memorial Race,” Speed News headlined in 2022.
“Capers Zentmeyer takes two-of-three at rain-soaked Road Atlanta in June,” Speed News headlined again last year.
“Capers Zentmeyer goes three-for-three at Carolina Motorsports Park,” it announced last November.
A typical account: “On lap five, the group caught a much slower car in Turn 7. As they worked to get around, Nicol and Zentmeyer made contact, turning Zentmeyer around and hitting hard into the inside wall. Zentmeyer wasn’t injured, but his car was not driveable. … Zentmeyer and his crew worked most of Saturday evening and into Sunday repairing his car from Saturday’s wreck. It wasn’t easy, but their hard work paid off as Zentmeyer sat on the pole for Sunday’s race.”
To what does Zentmeyer attribute his quick success? Football. He played tight end at the University of Virginia College at Wise and was accustomed to watching a lot of film of opposing teams. He now spendings a lot of time studying film of drivers on the different courses he’s racing — when they’re braking, when they’re opening the throttle, that sort of thing.
A few weeks ago, Zentmeyer went to a fraternity brother’s wedding in New York. The event was near the famed Watkins Glen speedway. There was also a race that weekend in his division. He left Martinsville on a Thursday night, hauling his racecar. On Saturday, he entered the qualifying and placed eighth out of 30 cars, good enough to make the race. He learned the course quickly. He won, just missed setting the course record, and still made the wedding.
‘A novel experiment’ in Martinsville
The racing world is in transition. The traditional lines between different types of racing — the stock cars on oval courses, the sports cars on road courses — are breaking down. One particular version of those road course races is the MX-5 series that features only Mazda vehicles. Just like the kind that Zentmeyer drives.
About a year ago, some conversations started taking place in the racing world: What if one of those road course races was held on an oval track? The Racer website calls this “a novel experiment” — one that will play out in Martinsville.
“NASCAR today isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago in terms of the car, the road courses and the entertainment factor,” Mazda Motorsports Senior Manager Jonathan Applegate told Racer earlier this month. “That’s produced a desire for a hybrid driver, one who isn’t necessarily coming from ovals and who can adapt to road courses. At the same time, MX-5 Cup drivers are increasingly open not only to racing in sports cars, but also seeing what opportunities lie in stock cars.”
This weekend, an MX-5 race will be included as part of the regular race card for the Virginia Is For Racing Lovers 300 Weekend at the Martinsville Speedway.
“This will be the first time since the early 1950s that on open-top car has raced here at Martinsville,” Martinsville Speedway president Clay Campbell told Racer, “so it’s bringing back some of how we started, but it’s also a chance for people to watch a car that’s very close to the one they can drive on the street racing here on our track.”
For authorities in the racing world, this is an opportunity for driver development and testing new markets. When Zentmeyer heard that an MX-5 race was coming to his hometown, he saw it as an opportunity as well. He wanted in. There was just one problem: He didn’t have a car that could compete at that level.
To fix that, he contacted the co-owner of a nearby racing team. He contacted Bill Stanley.
Politics and racing collide
Here’s where all of these things come together. The Sadler-Stanley team didn’t have a Mazda car, but it could rent one, so it has. There are companies that rent race cars. Stanley also lined up a corporate sponsor. Once again, Pace-O-Matic. Once again, politics and racing collide, just enough to trade some paint, so to speak. “Pace-O-Matic is standing up for these small businesses and here is this guy — he just wants a chance,” Stanley says. “That’s the stuff Pace-o-Matic digs. Somebody can try to put a black hat on Pace-o-Matic but this organization believes these things.”
So on Saturday, some racing history will be made, and it will be made at one of those short tracks that has survived — and not just survived, but kept itself part of the racing conversation. The Sadler-Stanley racing team gets a chance to try out a new level of the sport. And Stanley gets to make a political statement. One of the hang-ups to getting a skill game bill signed into law earlier this year were concerns by the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. It’s not lost on Stanley (or Pace-o-Matic) that Virginia Republicans depend heavily on rural voters — the type of voters who pack the stands at these tracks. Seeing a car with the Pace-o-Matic branding on it is essentially political advertising in a different form that might indirectly keep pressure on Republican office-holders to support the games. “Everybody in the stands are people who play the games,” Stanley says.
Finally, there’s a classic sports story here: A local weekend driver gets a chance to run with the pros, pros who have far more advantages than he does in terms of corporate backing.
Stanley feels so strongly about the underdog nature of his driver in this race that he paid to send out a press release about Zentmeyer on the PR Newswire. It says that Zentmeyer is “known affectionately in the racing world as ‘Beef’ by those who have witnessed his relentless and hard-charging dedication to the sport.”
I asked Zentmeyer where the nickname came from.
Stanley, he said, named him that.
Is the Clean Economy Act working as intended?
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- What Roanoke mayoral and city council candidates had to say in a forum this week.
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