In 2016, drivers who had raced at Thunderhill, started racing at the Cotton Bowl Speedway in Paige. Circuit of the Americas opened the same year, offering her a way to continue her career. In 2012, Naumann was forced to leave Thunderhill when the owner raised the rent. Before races she introduced each driver, giving them nicknames that the crowd could remember.Īround 2008, asphalt short tracks started closing in Texas, leading to the end of the Texas Super Racing Series. She created a “victory lane” where fans could meet their favorite drivers and get autographs. Naumann made the drivers take kids on rides in their cars on race night. She will do stuff to get kids involved, and any track she runs will have the cleanest bathrooms.” That’s something you’ll see anywhere Mary Ann is. “When Mary Ann came on board, she took it to another level,” Rodriguez said. She hired Rodriguez as a race announcer in 2008. She became the general manager at the track in 2003 and then a partner in 2007. Naumann brought the same energy to races at Thunderhill, an asphalt short track in Kyle that opened in 1998. “Because I was a woman promoter in a male-dominated field.” “It was very successful in the racing magazines,” Naumann said.
The series eventually brought her national recognition. Naumann developed her own set of rules and recruited a group of drivers to race against each other at several asphalt tracks around the state. Mary Ann Naumann and a co-worker set up food stations for the Lantern Festival hosted at the Cotton Bowl Speedway on Oct. The series solved one of the big problems in asphalt short track racing, which was that tracks throughout the state had inconsistent rules. She started the Texas Super Racing Series in 2003.
Naumann went on to make a name for herself in the 2000s as a race promoter. “She was one of the only ladies out there,” Rodriguez said, “She was good. When Naumann started racing in 1996, Rodriguez competed against her at Austin Speed-O-Rama, which had been renamed Longhorn Speedway. Rodriguez raced with Naumann’s brother, Jake Wallace Jr., in the 1990s, and became good friends with the Wallace family. “The first race car that I ever sat in as a kid was her dad’s,” Rodriguez said.
“Dad raced on Friday night, and we got together on Saturday morning and made changes to the car, then went to another track in San Antonio or somewhere else on Saturday night,” Naumann said.įorty-seven-year-old Austin resident Rodney Rodriguez remembers cheering for Naumann’s father, Jake Wallace, at the Speed-O-Rama track in the 1970s. Naumann grew up going to stock car races with her family at Austin Speed-O-Rama, an asphalt short track in southeast Austin where her father raced and she served as the trophy girl. NASCAR was formed in the 1940s to regulate the races, and the sport gained traction throughout the 20th century before losing popularity in the 2000s. Eventually they began racing those cars for pleasure. during the prohibition era when alcohol bootleggers modified commercially available cars to outrun law enforcement. “If they closed the track there would be no more racing around here. “We really jumped in to try to save the remaining part of local racing,” she said. So when Naumann heard that a short track near Austin was closing at the end of 2017, she and her husband stepped in to run it. The last asphalt short track in the state shut down in 2016, and at least eight dirt tracks in the state have been decommissioned in the past decade. In Texas, there are about 30 dirt short tracks in operation. In 2003, Naumann created MAN Racing Promotions, a short track promotion company.
Thirty minutes earlier, Naumann, wearing a full face of makeup and white jeans, had been driving around the oval track in a pickup truck, packing down the track’s red dirt.įor her day job, Naumann helps oversee Formula One races at Austin’s Circuit of The Americas racetrack, but her real passion is short track racing, which occurs on dirt tracks scattered in rural Texas. Stock cars whizzed around the three-eighths-mile track. On a damp Saturday in October, Mary Ann Naumann, 64, peered through a chain-link fence encircling the racetrack at the Cotton Bowl Speedway near the tiny Central Texas community of Paige. Chris Morris drives a car around the track at the Cotton Bowl Speedway in preparation for the final race of the season on Oct.