#MillerMotorsportsPark

A Utah judge has blocked the sale of Miller Motorsports Park to a Chinese investment firm because county commissioners may have illegally lowered the price to below fair-market value, KSL reported Thursday.

In a filing, Judge Robert Atkins said Tooele county officials tasked with selling the shuttered racetrack ignored higher bids to sell the racetrack for $20 million to Geely-backed Mitime Investment and Development Group. According to the report, county tax officials estimated the value of the track at $28.1 million.

A competing bidder, Center Point Management, said it offered $22.5 million for the park. The Wyoming-based company filed a lawsuit to stop the sale because they said county officials ignored their bid based on unverified promises by the Chinese group.

In honor of Miller Motorsports Park’s glorious sale back to the people, fellow auto scribe and LeMons chief judge Murilee Martin, Cheat Sheet Managing Editor Andrew Ganz and I made the people’s journey Thursday across the wasteland wonderful state of Wyoming to judge the proletariat’s race. (I’ll have a story on that later.)

The annual Return of the LeMonites will have a decidedly “red” feel this year, thanks to Murilee’s savvy Alibaba skills and dirt-cheap shipping costs from China.

This isn’t my first rodeo as LeMons judge — but it is my first tour for the best race series on the planet back in the Beehive State. I went to school at the University of Utah (AP No. 10, Coaches No. 12, ESPN No. 9) and Utah is my second home for many reasons. Basically, I’m saying I’m comfortable enough here to make terrible drivers go get me Beto’s if they drive like assholes.

Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele, Utah (about 45 minutes outside of Salt Lake City) has a new lease on life, Hot Rod is reporting. The racetrack will be purchased by Chinese carmaker Geely and renamed Utah Motorsports Campus. The facility could receive $50 million in upgrades to host more racing events in the future.

The track had been on the ropes after the Miller family, who took over after patriarch Larry H. Miller died in 2009, said they weren’t renewing the lease and walking away from the world-class racetrack.

Many car manufacturers will sell you a hot hatch. Only Ford will teach you how to drive one after you’ve bought it.

Thanks in part to the success of their Boss Track Attack program (of which your author is a proud graduate), Ford made the decision to offer a one-day track experience to anybody smart enough to buy either a Focus or Fiesta ST.

Since I had such a great time at the Boss Track Attack two years ago, there was no way I was going to pass up this opportunity to head back to Miller Motorsports Park and burn the brakes out of wring out one of their STs at one of the finest motorsports facilities in the world, especially if the track is as doomed as some say it is.

Earlier this month, Miller Motorsports Park said it would cease operations this October. Now, Tooele County, Utah officials intend to keep the track open.

If you’ve meant to make the trip to Utah to turn some laps around Miller Motorsports Park, you might want to do it this year. The jewel of a circuit located a short drive from Salt Lake City, built to the tune of $100 million, will close October 31st.

This is a continuation of Attack Of The Killer Mustangs, Part One.

So when we last saw our hero, er, me, I was finishing up my lead/follow session and heading back to the garage. I was incredibly eager to get back out on track, but next up was another classroom session. Turned out that this was really more Q&A than anything else-we had already covered most of the basics of track driving and the instructors wisely decided not to fill our novice heads with anything else at that point.

Image courtesy RallySportDirect

It came in the middle of a trip that verged on the surreal, and I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but it is possible that I was one of the last people to take a lap with Roger Miller around the track that bore his father’s name.