The most mysterious race track in America? It might very well be Hedge Hollow Raceway.
Nevertheless, word’s slowly getting out. It’s not so secret anymore–and it may just be the best driver’s track, too, according to several of our sources, including our own tire test editor, Andy Hollis.
The Myths, the Legends
Rumors abound about Hedge Hollow Raceway’s existence, how it came to be and its purpose. Is it an Illuminati playground? Does Bigfoot hide there? Or is it a testing ground for UAP or secret government technology?
We decided to risk having the men in black showing up at our doorstep by channeling our inner Fox Mulder, because, after all, the truth is out there.
Hedge Hollow Raceway is just an hour southeast of Kansas City, Missouri. You get off exit 141 on I-49 for Adrian, Missouri. Population 1730. Quickly the scenery turns from small-town America into something more reminiscent of the cartoon series “Courage the Cowardly Dog.”
“You wind your way through all these farms, and you go, ‘Man, where is this place?’” one source who wished to remain anonymous said. “Then, all of a sudden, you see this fence. The fence just keeps going. It looks like a secret government installation.
“Eventually you come to an unmarked gate,” he continued. “The day we went there, some guy was standing there. But when I went up there for a test day, there was nobody.”
“So how did you get in?” I asked. “Did they have to scan your retinas?”
Our source sounded nervous.
“I had to key in a code and then the gate opened up,” he said.
Then a world, totally unlike the seemingly endless fields of corn and soybeans, appeared before him.
“You roll in and there’s a huge facility,” he recalled. “There’s a big paddock in front of many garages. There’s plenty of room to do lots of things, but they don’t, because it’s private. Not private in that there’s membership. There’s only one member. The owner.”
As far as the actual track, another source provided his take.
“Everything you see at the track looks familiar in a vague race track language kind of way,” he said. “It feels like you’ve entered another dimension. Everything you look at tells you it’s a big deal of a race track, but you can’t place it. It’s never been on TV. I felt like I’d been dropped into this mysterious place that feels like a full-on European Formula 1 track, except the landscape doesn’t look particularly European.”
As you drive the course, the place becomes even more surreal.
“You’re like, ‘This has so many different elements of tracks you’ve driven in the past, and some of it feels familiar, some of it doesn’t,’” our third source said. “While you can’t see into the track, you can’t see beyond it either. It swallows you up into this great motorsports world.”
The Reality
Unfortunately, our investigation didn’t yield any cryptids, alien technology or Illuminati ties. (Let’s face it, we probably would have been killed if we did.)
However, we did discover one heck of a race track with a story behind it. Our conversations lead to the manager of Hedge Hollow Raceway, Nick Saleh, and eventually the track owner himself, David Dehaemers.
David, as you may have ascertained, did well for himself in life. His money came from the energy sector, but he has humble roots. David grew up at his father’s auto salvage yard. While David has a collection that includes several varieties of McLarens and Corvettes, he still has the only new car his father bought, a 1971 Corvette, which has just 11,000 miles on it.
“I grew up around cars,” David said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to do well financially, so I started buying nicer and faster cars. I didn’t have anywhere to run them. I didn’t want to spend time going somewhere and hauling them all over everywhere just to run fast. I was able to pick up some land. The original idea was just to put some pavement down and have something [where] I could go faster than on the highway and not worry about hurting anybody else or getting a ticket. The next thing I knew, I was building a race track.”
Project creep. It’s as real as for David with his track as it is for someone with a Lemons car.
David enlisted the services of race track architect Alan Wilson. You may recognize some of his work: Autobahn Country Club, GingerMan Raceway and Barber Motorsports Park. David said he didn’t take inspiration from any particular track, but he wanted to have a European-style road course since he grew up a fan of three-time F1 champ Sir Jackie Stewart.
Hedge Hollow Raceway consists of a 3.5-mile road course with up to five different configurations. It offers a bit of everything, and many racers rave about the flow of the track.
“It’s all about the layout,” SCCA’s Heyward Wagner said. “The speed of the corners and the flow of the corners are really well put together. There are a lot of places where you’ve got the car in a sequence of corners for a significant amount of time, so you’re constantly working the car through the course, yet it has really great straightaways.”
Furthermore, it’s forgiving. The track exceeds the FIA Grade 3 regulations.
“There’s runoff there–it’s fantastic,” Adam Spence, director of product development for HP Tuners, said. “It’s not like some other tracks where I wonder what might happen if I were to put two wheels off and end up in a precarious position. I never think of that at Hedge Hollow. I can just enjoy driving, enjoy the environment and enjoy hanging out in the paddock.”
Safety is paramount at Hedge Hollow. Despite being a private track, it was one of the first to implement the MyLaps X2 Race Control system. It features full track video coverage, with multiple monitors in race control, GPS tracking and electronic flagging stations.
Amenities? Twenty-plus garages, with washers, dryers and full bathrooms as well as entertainment suites with kitchens on the second story.
Ground broke on Hedge Hollow Raceway in 2018, and soon thereafter David started tracking his cars. However, he started to think about the field of dreams he built.
“I think there would be other people who would like to enjoy it,” David said. “I do have some annual costs that although I could support on my own, it doesn’t hurt to have other people help generate a little bit of revenue to defer the costs. I’m definitely, at this point, not making money on the project, but that wasn’t really ever the intention. I wanted to share it and have people enjoy it, because I do think it’s kind of fun–and there’s a lot of people who want to do this kind of thing.”
Notably, Hedge Hollow Raceway didn’t go with a members-only model for just the well heeled. While people can certainly pay to rent out the track, Hedge Hollow Raceway prefers to host bigger groups, like NASA and SCCA.
“I belong to a golf club,” David said. “I know that if you’ve got 200 members, you’ve got 200 different views of how the greens ought to be like. I don’t want to deal with that. I’ve got enough going on in my life that I don’t have to be running a club.”
It was the persistence of NASA MidAmerica Region’s Donna and Randy Lane that made David consider opening up the track for others.
“The story is that she parked her car at the gate and waited for one of our guys to come over,” track general manager Nick Saleh remembered. “She said, ‘I want to come out here. Here’s some information.’ We gave her a call and had her team out.”
That opened the door for NASA and other groups to come out, including Hooked On Driving Midwest, Xtreme Xperience and One Lap of America. SCCA now has a Track Night in America scheduled for May 1.
What started as just a solution for one car guy to go fast with his cars has blossomed into a destination for many other car people. It’s left David contemplating other uses for the beautiful facility.
“I don’t see us being a CoTA or anything like that,” David said. “I think back to some of the California tracks, where they had people who love the sport doing it. Eventually they morphed into something bigger, where they had sanctioned races. I could see that happening with us sometime. It may not be in my lifetime, but I’d like to see IMSA run there someday or something like that.”
That would certainly require upgrades for spectators, but the possibility of that happening is real. David’s not only a dreamer, but he’s clearly a doer. And just think: His passion for cars started out at 4 years old at his father’s salvage yard. And before his father passed away in 2022, David got to take him around the track.
“We drove around and I think he thought it was cool,” David recalled. “I think he thought I was a little crazy for spending the kind of money I was on it … but I think he did like it. Today would have been his 89th birthday, and I miss him.”
Hedge Hollow Raceway was a labor of love for David, but it might also stand out as a testament to the passion for cars instilled in him by his father, David Sr., and there’s absolutely no mystery about that.