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AN UPDATE ON THE RIVERSIDE MOTOR SPORTS PARK LLC
Date: 01/21/2008
Slowly but surely John Condren, Chairman and CEO of the Riverside Motor Sports Park LLC (RMP), is moving forward towards making his state of the art motor sports park a reality. RMP will be located in Atwater-California on 1,200 acres and will feature facilities for every type of racing that you can name.
Those facilities include a seven-eighths of a mile paved oval for stock car and open wheel events as well as a 3.2 mile road course for sports cars, endurance and open wheel racing. Also included in the plans is a 5,000 foot drag strip, a half mile paved oval, with an integrated quarter mile oval, for stock cars and sprint cars and a three-eighths mile dirt oval, with an integrated one-eighth mile oval, for stock cars, motorcycles, sprint midgets and quarter midget cars. Rounding out the design plans is a three-quarter mile kart course, a one half mile course motocross and BMX racing and a one mile off road circuit.
RMP has also aligned themselves with some impressive contributors to the project. Rusty Wallace and Associates, as in the former NASCAR champion turned racing broadcaster, has signed on as a design consultant for the super speedway oval. This is a very good move. Wallace and associates played a huge role in the design of the Iowa Speedway which has received rave reviews from racing teams, media and fans. Also joining the RMP team is Boris Said. The road course and endurance champion, and now a NASCAR driver, will be a consultant on the three-quarter mile road course for karts. The design for the 3.2 mile road course will receive the expertise of Derek Daly a Formula One and Indianapolis 500 veteran.
The 1,200 acre park located, in California's Merced County, offers some impressive stats that will likely lead to the park's overall success. This is especially true of population figures. 3.3 million people reside within a 60 mile radius of Atwater. Within a one hundred mile radius, including Sacramento and San Francisco, there are 9.1 million residents.
However the RMP has been plagued with some situations that have caused delays on its progress although all of them seem to have workable and timely solutions. There has been five, environmentally themed, legal challenges to the park. Four of them have already been resolved in the RMP's favor. The final challenge was the subject of a court haring back on November 26th and a final ruling on the issue is expected sometime in February. If the RMP also wins this challenge, and it is a strong possibility, then they will be free and clear to move on to phase two of the operation. If the ruling goes against the RMP then they will have to go through the process of additional environmental analysis to modify their environmental impact report that has already been approved by Merced County officials. This will naturally create a time delay in the park's progress but the impact of those delays are expected to minimal.
The other possible delay is a snag involving the park's financing plans estimated to be around $250 million dollars and that snag developed due to reasons no one could have seen coming. In August of last year there was a collapse in the equity based fixed income market and the situation carried itself into the beginning of this year according to the RMP's January newsletter. U.S. financial leaders judged the situation as being one of the worse financial crisises to hit this country in the last 100 years. In the course of just one week entire credit and investment markets completely collapsed. The RMP was reported to be in the final phase of securing its financing when the collapse started.
The park's financing is being handled by the investment firm of Stone and Youngberg LLC who recently reported on an bank based offer to fund the entire project. However RMP officials felt this was somewhat of a band aid approach to the financing and not necessarily in the best interest towards maximum benefits for the park and its private investors. The RMP preferred to stick to its original plan based on a mixture of $80 million in equity and $170 million in debt investments.
Recently the park's finances hit a new level of security when one of the five largest banks in the world agreed to underwrite the $170 million. However the remaining $80 million in equity may be a little more time consuming because the current financial crisis has caused potential equity based investors to postpone and re-evaluate their investment plans. However the RMP's investment team is confident that the last phase of the financing will be acquired and is reporting positive progress based on the facts that potential investment firms has an extremely high interest in the RMP's potential and there seems to be a general sense of improvement in overall market conditions.
There is still plenty of optimism that the RMP will hold its official ground breaking later this year. The Riverside Motor Sports Park's potential economic impact, as well as high quality racing, will likely make this park one of the best things that has happened in central and northern California in quite some time.
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