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Closing Shot: Victory Lap

Atlanta Motor Speedway President Ed Clark preps for his final NASCAR Cup Series race weekend and looks back at more than four decades in motorsports.

Ed Clark has handed out many trophies at Atlanta Motor Speedway, including this one to Jeff Gordon in 1999, one of seven NASCAR Cup Series wins for the driver that year.atlanta motor speedway

Ed Clark was a student at Virginia Tech in 1977 when he landed a job offer from Bristol Motor Speedway. Unfortunately, it was three months before he was scheduled to graduate. If he dropped out and took the job, Clark recalled, “my parents would have killed me.”

Clark turned down the offer, but when Bristol’s next candidate for the job didn’t pan out, the track called back.

“We’ll give you one more try, but you have to give us an answer,” a track official told Clark. “So I went and talked to my advisers, switched my classes around to Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I would drive 120 miles each way to work … until I graduated.”

The job launched a career in racing that would later take Clark to Charlotte Motor Speedway and then Atlanta Motor Speedway, where he will officially retire as president after this weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race. He’s been at AMS for nearly 28 years and his overall tenure with track owner Speedway Motorsports is topped only by Bruton Smith, who founded the company.

Clark has witnessed NASCAR’s rise from mainly a Southern sport to the largest form of motorsports in the U.S. In his first year at Atlanta in 1992, he watched a young Jeff Gordon run his first Cup Series race, which also happened be the final race for Richard Petty. In 2005, he oversaw repairs after the track was hit by a tornado.

More than a year ago, Clark gave up day-to-day control of the track to his right-hand man Brandon Hutchison, who now serves as executive vice president and general manager. Clark moved into a role working on long-term projects, namely a proposed $1 billion casino resort.

“I have been tremendously blessed to do something every day that when I wake up, I can’t wait to get there. Not everybody in this world can say that,” Clark said. “It truly has been a labor of love for me, and I still love it. I still can’t wait to get there, but there comes a time when maybe letting some smarter, more enthusiastic, younger folks have their run at it [is the right move]. It’s time to do that.”

Clark plans to remain as a consultant to help the track work toward making the proposed casino resort a reality. Georgia still hasn’t legalized sports wagering, but Clark said the resort idea is not just a pipe dream if betting is legalized.

In the meantime, the mission for track presidents today remains the same as when Clark started: Put butts in seats. Clark fondly recalls selling out that 1992 Cup Series race featuring Gordon and Petty, and calling Smith leading up to the event to tell the founder about the sellout. Smith had a classic quip: “What took you so long?”

“A lot of things have just worked out in my favor,” Clark said, when asked how he was able to spend his entire career in motorsports. “It’s truly been like a dream come true; there have been tough days, we all have them, but most days it’s not been like work.”

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