MANSFIELD — NASCAR racing legend Darrell Waltrip developed his own catch phrase as a television analyst when the green flag dropped at the start of a race.
“Boogity, boogity, boogity. Let’s go racin’, boys!” the retired driver would thunder into the microphone.
Matt Tifft can’t wait to see that same green flag drop at his new Mansfield Speedway in 2026 — especially when considering how much of his own green the Medina native has dropped at the facility since buying it earlier this year.
Tifft — who gained approval from the Mansfield Planning Commission on Tuesday afternoon for a new, $1 million massive Jumbotron screen at the track — has been racing for the past 150-plus days to get the once-closed facility off Crall Road back into racing form.
“We have about 7,000 yards of clay coming down from Fremont (in the next several days), about 600 dump truck loads,” Tifft said after the commission meeting, joined by his wife, Jordan, co-owner of the track.
“It’s a massive project, but the (entire) project is going really well,” he said. “We just wrapped up the Haunted Race Track promotion and that went well.
“The biggest thing is just trying to make sure we have everything prepped and ready (for racing in 2026),” said the former NASCAR Cup Series driver and Medina County native about the 180-acre property he purchased for $2.2 million from the Milliron Foundation.
“I know this all sounds (like a) salesman … (all) positive … but it’s honestly been really good,” Tifft said.
“Everything’s on time and I’d say we’re still, in a lot of aspects, further along than I thought we would have been.”
He does, admit, owning and rebuilding a track has also posed its challenges.
“Definitely just being in the construction world for the first time, you run into headaches and you run into setbacks and you have a lot of long nights and how to overcome them, and just trying to get aluminum from here and steel from here to there,” he said.
(Below is a video posted this week with updates and some financial details on what it’s costing to bring the Mansfield Speedway back to life on the city’s north side — around $8 million.)
“The community support has been amazing,” Tifft said.
‘You’re the guy who bought that Mansfield track’
In fact, he said, that surging groundswell of support has been the biggest surprise he has encountered since becoming a track owner.
“Jordan and I joke about this, (but) I think I’ve had more notoriety and fandom and support owning the Mansfield Speedway than I have like from racing in the Daytona 500,” Tifft said.
“I literally have gotten into so many situations where I’ve been in restaurants in different states and people are like, ‘ Wait a minute, you’re that guy who bought that Mansfield track, aren’t you?’
“I’m like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’ I mean people across the country now know of this place, which is so cool,” Tifft said.
“My social media following has grown three times what it was since June (since the purchase was announced). I’m not doing much different, but people have just found a passion for what we’re doing, the story of what we’re doing and what (Mansfield) has rallied around,” he said.
He has seen that local support for a race track that originally opened in 1959 and has seen its successes and failures over the years.
The track, which has been known by several names over the years, was formerly owned by Mansfield businessman and philanthropist Grant Milliron. Milliron, who founded Milliron Recycling when he was 18, passed away in 2023 at the age of 88.
Milliron bought the facility at sheriff’s auction in January of 2013 with a winning bid of $800,000. The track had been foreclosed on in 2010 because the former owner, Mike Dzurilla, owed more than $300,000 in back taxes.
Several efforts to pump life back into the track, which hosted NASCAR Craftsman truck series races from 2004 to 2008, have failed over the years. The facility returned to its dirt track roots in 2017 when promotor Cody Sommer partnered with Milliron.
But the track was shuttered after the 2019 season.
Tifft is giving the oval new life and hopes to have room for about 10,000 fans on race weekends.
“I think a lot of it comes back to I am a Cleveland guy and I think the whole Rust Belt area rallies around people who actually invest in this area and give it a chance. So many people flee and leave and and businesses don’t come back,” Tifft said.
I’ve seen people cry over this … having those memories come back’
“When you actually put your heart and soul into an area like this in Mansfield and Richland County, I think people get excited about that. It’s somebody believing in an area where typically people leave … and I think that’s that’s been cool to see … I’ve literally seen people cry over this and just having those memories come back,” Tifft said.
Part of his new work as a track owner has been navigating all of the paperwork and zoning issues and other facets associated with rebuilding a race track inside a city limits.
That’s why he attended the Planning Commission meeting to successfully obtain a variance for his Jumbotron, a structure that will be 62-feet tall and 70-feet wide on the east side of the track along the backstretch.
The screen itself will be 40-feet tall, but it will be 62-feet high when mounted on support poles. The city zoning code allows only for such structures to be 50 feet high, thus requiring the need for a variance, which was unanimously approved.
In addition to dotting i’s and crossing t’s, Tifft and his team have working on a schedule of 100-plus events for 2026 that include far more than dirt track racing. He is hoping to have a race scheduled announced by mid November.
‘We’re really trying to diversify our schedule’
“We’ve got a mix of kind of everything in there. We will have dirt track racing events, but we (also) will have motocross, monster truck-type stuff, concerts, drifting events, car shows, some community events like fireworks we’ll be doing with the city,” Tifft said.
He said plans include a huge kids’ playground at the track and the track will also work with Skate Ohio, a Mansfield-based non-profit that focuses on skateboarding.
That schedule diversity could be key to success when/if the rains come and wash out a racing weekend.
“We’re really trying to diversify our schedule to make sure that we can handle the Ohio weather, because (some) events can go on rain or shine. We’ll have probably eight or nine big dirt racing weekends.
“But those might be Fridays and Saturdays, a pair of days where we get that two- or three-day washout when you’re just sitting ducks. We are really trying to make sure we diversify ourselves,” Tifft said.
“This is not a dig at anybody in the past, but if you go off three or four big events a year and you lose one of them (to weather), you just lost 25 percent of your revenue and that’s a recipe for failure.”
