How long will the motors keep roaring around these parts?

June 11 is just another day in the calendar, unless you are Joe Montana, TV doctor Oz Mehmet, or others who had birthdays this past Monday.

It was also June 11, 1919 that Sir Barton claimed the Belmont Stakes to become the first horse to win the Triple Crown, following other victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness. And in 1979, movie star John Wayne lost his battle with cancer.

Much more obscure, and lost in time 40 years ago in 1978, the first stock car race was held at Spokane Raceway Park and won by Yakima’s Don Dowdy. Why is the day personally memorable? It came six days before my wedding on June 17.

I stood atop the backstretch berm snapping black and white photos with my first 35mm camera. While the negatives are MIA, a few of the of prints have survived multiple moves and brought back fond memories.

Fast-forward 40 years. My wife and I will celebrate another milestone anniversary, but the oval, — part of the Spokane County Raceway complex that includes a drag strip and road-racing course — has sat silent since April 30 and likely will for the remainder of 2018. And beyond that, who knows?

April 30’s when the latest track operator, Rick Nelson, got fed up and walked away in the early stages of his fourth season trying to revive a part of the racing complex with a checkered past.

Nelson had sunk a rumored $750,000 of his own money from the Park Model Homes business he operates into the track. But the last straw supposedly was mindless chatter on social media.

Craig Smith is the current lease-holder for track owners, Spokane County. He’s sub-leases the oval and has had a number of wannabe’s try, yet fail to make the track viable.

It’s been a bad last couple of decades for auto racing in the Pacific Northwest, with no less than 10 oval tracks either bulldozed or on the back-burner. And others — Stateline Speedway and the Wenatchee Super Oval — operate with creeping subdivisions in the distance.

Among the dead, Portland Speedway in 2001. Then in 2003 Spanaway Speedway near Tacoma finally got gobbled up by a surrounding housing development and Tri City Raceway was lost to a vineyard. Calgary’s Race City succumbed to an expanding landfill in 2011.

Another Canadian venue, SunValley Speedway is mired in disputes with homeowners in the Vernon, B.C. area and has not operated in a couple of seasons.

As with many racing facilities, it’s a chicken-and-egg question. What was there first, the track or the houses? Pacific Raceway, formerly Seattle International Raceway, opened in 1959, in the middle of nowhere along State Route 18. Yet lately, encroaching homes have been the tail that wags a noisy dog.

A sale for a planned commercial development along Interstate 82 initially closed half-century-old Yakima Speedway in November 2017, but the wheels were turning so slow that owner Ted Pollock has leased the track for limited operation beginning July 4.

And Montana Raceway Park, which sits atop a hill with spectacular vistas of mountains in every direction, is in the slow process of being turned into a housing development. It’s a no brainer when one considers making bank selling view lots vs. having to deal with racers asinine hissy-fits.

It’s funny to think that auto racing here in the 1960s and 1970s easily outdrew some of baseball’s best when both competed often head-to-head at the Spokane Interstate Fairgrounds. That Steve Garvey, Ron Cey or Tommy Lasorda lost the ticket sale contest with the next-door neighbor, or a school teacher named Tom Sneva, is a bit hard to fathom.

That fervor fueled the boom that built SRP and Stateline.

And, perhaps it’s now a sign of changing times and attitudes where racing struggles. But the pending death of auto racing in these parts comes by the track operators own hands.

With social media taking hold as a free marketing medium, the tracks have retreated in Medieval fashion to their own little fiefdoms, some waging scheduling wars with their neighbors.

Hockey and baseball both had similarly diminishing legions of true fans in the area. But under the Brett brothers’ ownership they put 10s of thousands of non-fans in the stands, effectively saving both sports.

Auto racing has not embraced this creativity and the results are not hard to see. Its future has the uncertainly of a crash at a figure-8 race.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.