Ring of Fire

A guy sure looks cool when he leans against a race car.

Austin Siebert is wearing a fire suit and standing next to a $35,000 machine parked on the track of I-70 Speedway in Odessa, Missouri. Siebert is 19 years old and built like a teen heartthrob — long bangs and a body thin enough to put in the mail.

Siebert drives a Monte Carlo. The stock car better resembles the painted blurs that whip around NASCAR tracks than anything available in a Chevrolet showroom. Classified as a late model, Siebert's car was specially constructed for racing on asphalt at 140 mph.

During a pre-race autograph session, Siebert and his ride look professional in every way but one. In keeping with the rules of tonight's feature, the Missouri 100, one of the crown events of the I-70 racing season, the windshield of each car must display the driver's last name. Custom decals adorn most windshields. Siebert's name is spelled with pieces of fluorescent orange tape. "Pretty ghetto," he admits.

Siebert lives in Lake Lotawana with his parents when he's not at college in Warrensburg. A Rockhurst High School graduate, he started racing go-karts when he was 15. Then he moved to supertrucks. Over the winter, he and his father, Travis, put together a team to race late models.

All kinds of vehicles race at I-70 Speedway, even school buses. But late models are the fastest cars to circle I-70's steeply banked oval. The course is tricky. Racing people call I-70 "wicked fast," the word wicked an expression of both delight and apprehension.

The track, which opened in 1969, is renowned for thrilling racing. Drivers talk about its aura and quickly recite the names of racing heroes who have tested themselves at the speedway, including Bobby Allison, Rusty Wallace and Mark Martin. "You would have guys towing over 500 miles just to compete there," says Scott Cordon, a 1978 rookie of the year in the street-stock division.

In racing, excitement usually means danger. I-70 Speedway has a reputation for producing spectacular wrecks, crashes that turn prized race cars into smoking clumps of twisted metal. Physics (cars moving really fast) meets geometry (30-degree banks), with often heartbreaking results. "Typically, if you crash at I-70, you bought a new car," says Scott Traylor, a car owner who talks about racing on WHB 810.

Drivers put their asses, as well as their checkbooks, on the line. In 1993, two cars exploded after a collision at I-70. One of the drivers, Tony Walls of Alabama, crawled out of the passenger side of his car, engulfed in flames. Traylor ran from his spot in the infield toward Walls, grabbing an extinguisher from a slow-moving firefighter. "Skin was dripping off his arms," Traylor says. Walls survived but spent months in the hospital.

In the 1970s, two drivers were killed in crashes at I-70. Others have had body parts amputated or have left for tracks where they're more likely to cross a finish line than watch a wrecker drag their cars into the pits.

The departed drivers say they miss the thrill of racing at I-70. The ones who stay hold on to the belief that a racer who masters the speedway's vertiginous turns can drive anywhere.

Austin Siebert looks at I-70 as a proving ground. He hopes to drive one day in the Nextel Cup series.

But first, he will need to keep from crumpling his car.

"It's a dangerous place," Siebert says a few hours before the running of the Missouri 100. "I'm sure that by the end of the night, there'll be five cars that are completely junk."

Ultimately, six cars will fail to finish the race because of accidents.

Siebert's will be one of them.

I-70 Speedway advertises itself as America's fastest weekly racetrack. "A true racer will want to race this racetrack," says owner Brad McDonald.

McDonald is in his sixth year running I-70 Speedway, its sign visible from the interstate for which it is named. His family owns a food wholesale business. McDonald, 38, has been coming to the track since he was in kindergarten. Seven or eight years ago, he and his father, Randy, owned a $52,000 car that raced at I-70. The car was destroyed when their driver put it into a wall.

Even an undamaged car that races at I-70 loses money: The purses are just too small to cover the costs. For McDonald and his father, owning a car was simply a way to express their passion for motor sports. McDonald likens racing to an addiction. "Once you get it in you, you'll drop anything into it," he says. "It's like drugs."

But rather than spend another $50,000 on another car, McDonald decided to buy something more enduring — the track itself.

McDonald lives in Shawnee, 64 miles west of the speedway. The commute gives him time to think, he says. He often stays past sundown. "You work 14-hour days that don't feel like 14-hour days," he says.

A handful of full-time employees and countless part-timers and volunteers assist McDonald. A racetrack requires a lot of attention. In a season, I-70 goes through as many as 100 gallons of paint to cover the marks left when cars collide with the walls.