TALLADEGA — Teresa Hicks hears the complaints. And she’s trying her best to do something about them.“People say there’s not much to do in Talladega,” she said Saturday. “So we’re trying to give them something else to do.”
She and husband John see their efforts rewarded in the form of large turnouts at Talladega Off-Road Mud Track, located on Stemley Bridge Road, within sight of Alabama 77.
The two of them are in their first year of personally overseeing a track built in 2004.
“We’ve owned this property for over 20 years,” she said. “And my husband said, ‘We’ve got to do something to make some money out here.’ It was just laying here.
“We just decided this year that we would just run it ourselves, so we took it over and we’re doing fairly well with it. We think it could be better, but the first year is always kind of hard. It’s growing, doing pretty good.”
The track offers mud racing in five different divisions once per month, with 17 trophies given out at each event. It’s also open on off-days for “people to come out and ride their four-wheelers, four-wheel drives” as well.
“We’ve got mud bogs over there,” she said, “trails back up in the woods, we’ve got 130 acres altogether. They can pretty much drive anywhere.”
The fourth event of this young racing season takes place today, with gates opening at 1 p.m. Hicks estimated that “anywhere between 700-1,000” spectators regularly attend the events.
“And still, I come out here, and think it doesn’t look like there’s very many people,” she said. “We’ve got enough space out here, people on the hill where they can see the whole track. And then of course, down the hill, there’s our pit area, where the trucks go. We have people that park all on that hillside, also.”
The drivers themselves are locals, for the most part. But, according to the proprietors, it’s not uncommon to have participants from “Florida and all over.”
“We usually have ... 20-30 drivers,” Teresa said. “Usually we have two drivers per truck, and sometimes we’ll have three drivers in the same truck.
“They put a lot of money into their trucks, because they go to as many tracks as they can, and there’s not that many tracks in this area. We have them come from all over.”
Anyone interested in being one of those participants need only call Hicks (256-480-0861) for a rulebook and guidelines on getting started.
“We let anybody in,” she said. “We don’t discriminate.
“We have a rulebook that we send out, and it’s got all the information about what we require for the trucks to race in different classes. We have 5 classes and, we give out 17 trophies. There’s 5 classes, and then the big eliminator and the small eliminator — that’s the big money run. All they’ve got to do is come get a rulebook ... it’s as simple as that.”
Both John and Teresa share a long-term vision for the track, as well.
“We would like to get it built up enough that we have 20 trucks every race,” she said. “We want to get other things going on out here, too — we want to build better trails, more trails, the rock-crawling thing. Kind of build it up, have more stuff going on.”
In the short term, however, it’s hard to argue with what works.
“We usually have anywhere from 9 to 18 trucks, depending on if they can all be here at one time,” she said. “It just depends on what’s going on at what time.
“You never know what’s going to happen until we get here.”
