TOOELE — To get to the race track, drive west from Salt Lake City and turn left.
Oh, and brace yourself, because no matter how much you think you know what a race track in the middle of the west desert will look like, until you turn off Sheep Lane about halfway between the metropolises of Tooele and Grantsville and stare at it yourself, you really have no idea what a race track in the middle of the west desert will look like.
"I talk about it to people all the time," says the race track's owner, Utah Jazz owner, auto dealership magnate and sometimes film critic Larry H. Miller, "I show them diagrams and try to describe it. But it still blows you away when you actually see it."
Miller Motorsports Park is Miller's gift to himself, a tribute to his car-loving roots, not to mention a tribute to American entrepreneurship. Buy and sell enough vehicles, and the occasional baseball and basketball player, and you can afford to spend $80 million on a hobby and make the desert blossom like asphalt.
On 511 mostly flat, mostly barren acres he has leased from Tooele County for the next 99 years, Miller has merely built the longest race course in America. At 4.5 miles, the track is slightly longer than the 4.4-mile track at Road America in Wisconsin, the previous record-holder, and almost double the 2.5-mile course at the fabled Indianapolis Speedway.
If all the spectating berms that surround the track — 30-foot-tall man-made perches that are the result of moving around a million yards of dirt — were stretched to their spectating capacity, nearly half a million people could watch the action.
No one, not even Miller, envisions an event of that magnitude. But, then, no one, not even Miller, envisioned a track of this magnitude, either.
His original intent was simply to build a race track so he could drive on it.
He first tried to make it happen in the small town of Mead, Colo., about 25 miles north of Denver, where he bought a few hundred acres with the intent of building a track about two miles in length.
One problem. He forgot to first get the land zoned for a race track. In a resulting referendum on the local ballot, his race track plans were shot down 93 percent to 7 percent.
That sent him to Plan B, a plot of unused ground owned by Kennecott in the northwestern tip of the Salt Lake Valley.
Before the deal could go through, however, plans and proposals had to be submitted to any number of government entities, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and various wetlands groups.
No one objected to the project. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that no one responded, period.
Wanting to do something before it couldn't be labeled a midlife crisis, Miller abandoned the red tape of the Kennecott project and moved on to Plan C in Tooele, where the county leaders, once they realized the proposal had nothing to do with nuclear waste or storing nerve gas, did everything but carry Miller around on their shoulders.
When he told them he wanted to bring out some fast Mustangs and run 'em, the deal was done.
In typical Miller fashion, no time was wasted in construction. The man who built the Delta Center in 16 months built his motorsports park faster than that. He put his fast track on the fast track. Ceremonial groundbreaking took place on April 26, 2005, and the first paying customers, several dozen motorcycle racers, were burning rubber a month ago on April 1, 2006.
A month from now, by June 10, when a free Sneak Peek is scheduled, the Motorsports Park is projected to be completely buffed out and ready for public inspection.
Miller is beside himself at his own dumb luck.
"This is by far a better site than anything else we ever considered," he says. "Everything has worked out. Even the flat ground, which at first we thought would be a negative, has proved to be a good thing."
But to really appreciate what he's saying, you have drive west, then turn left.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.