Hot Rod Tour comes to Darlington Raceway
Jonathan Mill, Publisher of Hot Rod Magazine, visited Darlington Raceway on May 9 to promote the upcoming tour. Photo by Melissa Rollins
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Next month, car fans will converge on the Darlington Raceway when the Hot Rod Power Tour rolls into Darlington. Jonathan Mill, Publisher of Hot Rod Magazine, visited the raceway on May 9 to promote the upcoming tour.
“We’ve never been to Darlington so it is really important for us to come to new places for the Power Tour,” Mill said. “We are in our 24th year and Darlington Raceway is a really cool small raceway that we’ve always had on the map and never got a chance to make it over here; we’re really excited to be here.”
The Hot Rod Power Tour will stop in Darlington on June 13.
“(The tour) is seven cities in seven days,” Mill said. “We try to hit as many tracks as we can that way everybody has something to do. If we’re not at a track, we’re usually doing autocross in the parking lot. The fans love it.”
What started as a small gathering has exploded in the two decades it has taken place.
“This started in 1995 with 15 people,” Mill said. “Seven long haulers actually made it all the way to Norwalk. They said that they had project cars and they were going to drive over to Power Fest and whoever wanted to join could join. Now we have 2,000 long haulers, 5,000 cars and hundreds of thousands of people coming out. It has grown exponentially year after year. People just fell in love with it.”
Though the initial catalyst went away, the tour kept going because of how much people enjoyed it, Mill said.
“When Power Fest went away we kept the tour because people love to have a cruise across America,” Mill said. “We always pick it up wherever we left off and try to do 1,500 to 2,500 miles.”
