The Willow Springs Motorcycle Club (WSMC) will not race at Willow Springs Raceway in December of 2008, and its feature race at the monthly events will be longer and triple the payout to the winner, members of the family that owns the track said today. The changes are designed to make life a little easier around the holidays for WSMC racers, who until now had a year-round race schedule, and to put more money into the pockets of the Toyota Cup Unlimited Formula One racers who no longer have the Toyota 200 payouts to look forward to. “December gets to be inconvenient for some people,” said Chris Huth, son of track owner Bill Huth.”At that time of the year, you’ve got Thanksgiving, Christmas is right there, and New Year’s is coming up, and there’s the weather, which might not be all that great. Mainly, it’s just for the convenience of the racers. We might have a special event, a track day, but we wanted to take it out of the points-paying series, so racers aren’t forced to show up.” With the December round cancelled, track officials will be talking to class sponsors to determine whether the money that would have been available to racers at that round will be distributed elsewhere in the season, Huth says. With the cancellation of the $150,000 Toyota 200, Huth says the track wanted to increase the stature of the monthly feature race at the WSMC events the Toyota Cup F1 race. Starting in April, the race length will be increased from 12 to 20 laps around the 2.5-mile main circuit, making the event 50 miles long. Currently, WSMC’s Solo Series features 20-lap races on Saturday afternoons in the spring and summer; the Toyota Cup race will match those in length. “We’re sure that Dunlop has a tire that will last that long, and the other manufacturers will step up,” said Huth. “And they run big bikes in the Solo races that are 20 laps long; that’s another good way to look at this.” Increasing F1 races to 20 laps will be no problem from a tire point of view, said the trackside vendors for Michelin and Dunlop. “We’ve tested last summer and through the end of the year, and we’ve got some new stuff that will be available this year that will work very well,” said Dale Kieffer, owner of Racers Edge Performance, the Michelin distributor at Willow Springs. “The tires we used in the Toyota 200, we had no problems with traction, no problems with them coming apart.” Same story for Dunlop, according to Dennis Smith, owner of Sport Tire Services (Dunlop’s trackside vendor), who stated in an e-mail to Roadracing World, “20 lap F-1 events at Willow Springs? Well … the last two Toyota 200s, the lap times were in the high 1:21s and low 1:22s as I recall. Last year (2007) we had three or four red flags, so the tires didn’t have to go much more than 20 laps at a time. But in 2006, the front runners went 29 or 30 laps on Dunlops with no problems. It was Steve Rapp and Jeremy Toye going at it for the entire 200 miles. High 1:21s and low (-to mid) 1:22s was their pace. We’d have no problem supplying tires for riders who want to be competitive at Willow.” And the purse for the Formula 1 race will increase to $10,000 per month, with $3000 to the winner, $2000 for second and $1000 for third, Huth said. The remaining payout amounts and the depth of payout were still being discussed this afternoon, Huth said. Previously, the race paid $1000 to the winner. Huth said that more adjustments may be necessary as the changes are put into place. On other topics, Huth said: – There is a possibility that the AMA Superbike series could race at Willow Springs again. “I know my dad (Bill Huth) is enthusiastic about the NASCAR guys buying the AMA,” Chris Huth said. “I’d say he’s open to the idea of having an AMA round, which is something he wasn’t interested in doing with the old AMA management. At least he’s open to the idea now. But it wouldn’t be a replacement for the Toyota 200.” The last AMA round at Willow took place in 2000; the round scheduled for the following year was cancelled after the attacks of 9/11. – A partial repaving of the Streets of Willow track, where WSMC is hosting a four-round motorcycle road race series for the second year, is scheduled to begin next week. The new pavement will be laid over the places on the track where the old surface has “alligatored,” Huth says. “We can fix cracks, but we can’t fix it when chunks start to come up. We can’t do the whole thing at once, because people have it booked, but we’re going to start at the places where it’s worst.” The first section of the track to be repaved will stretch from Turn Two to Turn Four, he said.