The town council of Hudson, Colorado, voted unanimously to approve annexation and zoning for a new Bandimere Speedway, clearing the biggest bureaucratic hurdle yet for a drag strip that shut its gates nearly three years ago after a 65-year run.
Bandimere Speedway in Morrison was known as “Thunder Mountain” on the NHRA pro circuit. It was the kind of place where families brought lawn chairs on Friday nights and top fuel cars shook the foothills on race weekends. Development swallowed the land around it, and in 2023, the Bandimere family locked up rather than fight a losing war with encroaching subdivisions.
But they didn’t sell. They didn’t walk away. They went looking for dirt.
John Bandimere Jr., son of the man who founded the track, announced in 2025 that the family had purchased land in Weld County, right next to Interstate 76, northeast of Denver. Hudson is a small town, roughly 10 miles farther from the city center than Morrison, and that distance is the entire point. Out there, the neighbors are fewer and the lots are bigger.
The unanimous council vote covers annexation and zoning, the legal groundwork that allows the land to be used as a motorsports facility. No construction timeline has been announced, and anyone who’s watched a racetrack get built from scratch knows the gap between a zoning approval and a functioning quarter-mile can stretch for years. Permits, grading, concrete, timing systems, grandstands, drainage — none of it is cheap and none of it is fast.
Still, the Bandimere family has something most shuttered tracks never get: a second act written by the same people who wrote the first one.
The new site sits at roughly 5,000 feet above sea level, which means the thin-air performance challenges that defined racing at Morrison will follow the operation to its new home. Naturally aspirated cars always struggled there. Turbo and supercharged setups had to be retuned. That quirk became part of Bandimere’s identity, and it stays intact.
The broader pattern in American motorsports has been grim for decades. Tracks close because land values spike, because neighbors complain about noise, because the economics of running a facility that hosts events 30 weekends a year can’t compete with a developer offering eight figures for the acreage. The list of casualties is long — Great Lakes Dragaway, Seattle International Raceway, Old Bridge Township Raceway Park — and most of them never come back.
Lately, though, a few counterexamples have emerged. Willow Springs Raceway in California’s high desert found new ownership with revival plans. Virginia International Raceway locked down its long-term future. And now Bandimere is grinding through the municipal process to plant a flag somewhere new.
What separates Bandimere from the tracks that simply vanish is stubbornness. The family could have taken a developer’s check for the Morrison property and retired comfortably. Instead they bought raw land in a plains town and started the whole process over — council meetings, zoning hearings, all of it.
No Christmas tree is lit yet. No concrete has been poured. But the hardest part of building a racetrack has never been the construction. It’s convincing a municipality to let you do it in the first place. That fight, at least, is over. The Bandimere family got a unanimous yes from a town that apparently wants them there, which is more than Morrison could say in the end.
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