South Georgia Motorsports Park in Adel, Georgia found itself in the crosshairs of Hurricane Helene late last week as it made landfall as a powerful Category 4 storm, 65 miles to the southwest on Florida’s gulf coast. The popular NHRA-sanctioned racetrack and the surrounding Valdosta community, home to more than 55,000 residents, was significantly impacted as the storm arrived as a still-strong category 2 storm, toppling structures, power poles, and trees, making the facility and the city nearly impassable.
In the aftermath, newly-minted track owner Raul Torres and his team trekked through the rubble to enter the facility and begin assessing the damage and begin the cleanup process. At the same time, they graciously made use of the open real estate of the 380-acre property and opened their gates to area utility companies to stage trucks and equipment for the massive disaster response and power restoration efforts.
Torres described the initial devastation, saying, “It took me almost two hours to get to the racetrack on a four-wheeler, trespassing into people’s properties, going over logs that were on the street, going over power lines. I prayed to God before crossing them, not knowing if they were live or not. We needed to get out here to put eyes on the property. Once we arrived, the bigger problem we saw was that our building at the entrance was on the ground, and we have a fuel station down there that had completely collapsed.”
Despite the damage to the property, the focus shifted immediately to supporting the surrounding community. “Our hobbies are not one of our priorities right now,” Torres emphasized. “Although this is our passion and our livelihood, people’s well-being and safety come first. The racetrack itself wasn’t destroyed, but the community was, and that was our major concern.” This outlook prompted Torres and his team to transform the track into a vital staging ground for utility companies as they worked to restore power and clear debris.
Within hours of assessing the damage, utility trucks began rolling into the facility. Torres recalled, “We had Colquitt EMC, our local electric company, AT&T, and Georgia Power knocking on our doors to let them in. Within two hours, Georgia Power had probably 150 trucks in here, of which three or four of them were cranes. They helped us take care of that bigger problem. We had a red iron building that had fallen and was blocking the exit to the property. The way the Lord works is mysterious — 24 hours later, we had three cranes on site to remove it.”
The facility became a hub for the local recovery effort. “At any given time, we had over 200 Georgia Power workers and around 60 or 70 crews still on-site,” Torres mentioned. “Their main goal was to restore the substations, and they accomplished that. Now, Colquitt EMC is responsible for bringing power from those substations to businesses and homes, and they’ve done an amazing job as well.”
Though SGMP sustained its share of damage, including to the entrance building and fuel station, Torres remains optimistic. “Fortunately, nothing was catastrophic, thank God. The timing system, which is the biggest artery of the racetrack, was preserved. We’ve been on pins and needles all week, but when we received power this morning, we checked every sensor, ran several passes, and it’s working flawlessly.”
Despite the toll the storm took on both the facility and the community, Torres and his team at South Georgia Motorsports Park are committed to ensuring the racetrack returns to normal operations while continuing to support the area’s recovery process. The track is set to welcome racers from around the country to the hard-hit area next week, as it hosts DuckX Productions’ No Mercy 15, October 5-13.
