Seekonk Speedway: The Action Track of the East

On Memorial Day of nineteen forty-six, a large crowd packed a quarter-mile oval in Seekonk, Massachusetts, for the opening night of a race track that would outlast the manufacturing economy that built it, the neighborhoods that surrounded it, and almost every other short track in New England.

The man behind it was D. Anthony Venditti, who built the track. Venditti had started construction the previous year, converting a patch of flat Massachusetts farmland into a racing venue at a moment when returning veterans and factory workers were hungry for exactly this kind of entertainment: loud, fast, and affordable. He had found the right moment and the right place.

Seekonk Speedway holds the distinction of being the longest continuously family-owned race track in the United States. The Venditti family has operated it without interruption since that first Memorial Day. The track was expanded to a third-mile oval in nineteen eighty, adding width, at seventy-two feet, Seekonk is the widest track in New England, and opening up passing lanes that dirt tracks could not provide.

Over eighty years of racing, the track has served as a proving ground and a finishing school. The NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour came here in nineteen eighty-seven. The series that is now the ARCA Menards East ran races at Seekonk in nineteen eighty-seven and again in the early two thousands. Scores of drivers who later competed at the national level made their names on this third-mile oval on Friday nights before summer crowds.

The track still runs a full season of weekly racing from late May through September, fielding Late Models, Pro Stocks, Sportsmen, and Sport Trucks. In a region where dozens of short tracks have gone dark since the nineteen eighties, Seekonk keeps the lights on.