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Millville lands racing park deal
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff
For 6 1/2 years, officials in Cumberland County tried unsuccessfully to build a major international speedway in Southern New Jersey. Yesterday, however, they nabbed the next best thing, announcing a deal with a leading auto racing developer to build a $100 million motorsports park and hotel complex next to the Millville Airport.
"It's like Christmas in June," Millville Mayor James Quinn said. "We've gone through the gambit on this, but I know this fits our area very well."
That's the hunch being played by developer Harvey Siegel, owner of Virginia International Raceway in Danville, Va., who said Millville, with just 27,000 residents, has everything it needs to become one of the country's leading racing centers.
The planned Thunderbolt Raceway at New Jersey Motorsports Park -- construction is projected to begin in the spring, with an opening date in April 2006 -- is vastly different from the country's superspeedways, which have grandstands that can hold 140,000 fans and banked, 2.5-mile tracks where cars zoom at 200 mph. But Siegel, who also built the Mercer Mall, said the track's location just an hour's drive from Philadelphia and Atlantic City and 2 1/2 hours from New York makes it an ideal destination for both amateur and professional racing enthusiasts.
"We are going to provide a great service under great circumstances and the people will come," said Siegel, who races vintage sports cars in his free time.
Whether it means getting people to tune into the weekly NASCAR race or joining a sports car club, motorsports represent one of the few growth areas of the sports business today. The Millville facility will try to capitalize on the growing popularity of motorsports as a competition but also a leisure activity similar to golf or tennis.
The New Jersey Motorsports Park will feature a 4.7-mile road track, a three-quarter-mile tri-oval, a country club with a pool and tennis courts, car paddocks with room for 1,000 automobiles, luxury suites, track-side condominiums, and seating for 15,000 fans.
Siegel said the facility is likely to host a half-dozen sanctioned motorcycle, automobile and truck races each year. On the weekends when races are not taking place, automobile clubs that focus on a specific brand, such as Porsche or Maserati, will rent the facility along with large businesses that use such tracks to entertain clients. Last year, Virginia International Raceway lured 250,000 spectators and 50,000 additional visitors.
Siegel and his partners, Jerry Holtz of Pennsylvania, and Lee Brahin of Cherry Hill, are committing $85 million to the project, which includes buying the 705-acre site for roughly $3.7 million.
Millville plans to spend $5 million, mostly to connect the city's water and sewer lines to the site, while the developers will also seek nearly $10 million in state funding that could come from the state's Casino Reinvestment and Development Authority, which distributes funds from casino taxes to urban projects throughout the state.
State Sen. Nicholas Asselta, a Republican whose district includes Cumberland County, said securing the funding from the state would not be difficult.
"The support for this project has been bipartisan from the beginning," Asselta said. "Whatever the state can do to help, we'll be there."
In addition to the racing tracks, the developers want to leverage the facility to build an industrial park focused on the automobile industry, four hotels and a high school for students who want to specialize in racing.
The vast project is sweet victory for Millville resident Donald Fauerbach, an owner of stock car racing teams who has been trying to sell state officials on the idea of a major motorsports facility in southern New Jersey since the mid-1990s.
"Three governors told us they'd support our project so long as we could produce a developer with experience in motorsports who knew how to get this done and lure races," Fauerbach said. "Mission accomplished."
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