Hall of Fame Honors Late Flemington Promoter Paul Kuhl
By Steve Barrick
Promoter Paul Kuhl, whose 30-year stewardship at NJ’s Flemington Fair Speedway earned the track national prominence, will be honored posthumously with the Leonard J. Sammons Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to Auto Racing. The recognition will take place during the 2023 Hall of Fame ceremonies on Thursday, July 13, at the Northeast Dirt Modified Museum and Hall of Fame on the grounds of Weedsport Speedway in New York. Kuhl was a second generation Flemington Fair Board President, assuming the role after his namesake father passed away in 1967. The Fair Board had always appointed someone to run racing events, and when the previous promoter resigned at the end of 1970, Kuhl decided he would like to try it. Kuhl was eager to remedy some bad past business practices that caused the track to lose money. “My father didn’t like that the Fair Board had stopped running races after Labor Day. He also didn’t like that the track had been calling off races early in the morning if there was even a drizzle,” Kuhl’s son Rick said. Kuhl’s first few weeks as promoter of Flemington could not have come at a worse time. The world of local dirt Modified racing was immersed in an evolving dispute with the Tri-State Drivers & Owners Association, a group that petitioned area race tracks for more money and a voice in race car design specifications. When Kuhl’s first Modified program was scheduled in April, Tri-State’s members picketed the track, parking their rigs on the side of Route 31. To defend against the regional assault, Kuhl joined up with other promoters—Don Jones from East Windsor, Al Howard at Middletown, Jerry Fried at Nazareth. Allied or not, the first few weeks of Kuhl’s first year as Flemington’s promoter were a challenge. “In the beginning of 1971, we had short fields and my father was running added attractions to the races to make up for that. He was always thinking about giving the fans a good show,” Rick recalled. Tri-State ran its course, leaving the new and now battle-tested promoter the opportunity to move forward. Often characterized as flamboyant, Kuhl’s approach to promotion was to inject excitement by creating new events, raising purses and launching a publicity campaign that catapulted Flemington onto the front pages of trade papers. In his first two years, he created the Flemington 200 and signed up to be part of the inaugural Syracuse CRC Chemicals Series (the forerunner of today’s Super DIRTcar Series). He nearly doubled the number of races run at Flemington in his first year at the helm. Kuhl, Nazareth’s Jerry Fried, and Orange County’s Betty Gessner later joined forces to create the Tri-Track Series, a jointly hosted promotion of September races. The concept was successful enough that it became a six-race series in its second season. East Windsor Speedway owner Don Jones and Kuhl created the New Jersey State Championships—East Windsor racing Fridays and Sundays, and Flemington on Saturdays. “It was a good deal for the drivers because of the point fund that the two tracks created,” Rick Kuhl shared. “My father enjoyed the camaraderie with the other promoters. He’d go to their tracks, they’d come to our Syracuse qualifier. Howie Commander, Ron Compani, Stan Friesen, the Five Mile Point guys…it was all a lot of fun,” Rick stated. As a promoter, Kuhl had his own vision and his own style. “He wasn’t involved in the details of running the races but interjected, from his position in the grandstands with the fans. He was reacting to what was happening as a fan would,” Rick recalled. Kuhl adopted the color purple as Flemington’s brand which became so synonymous with the track that the clay was, for a time, infused with flecks of purple plastic. “That all started because that was the color of our first pace car, the purple Dodge Challenger,” Rick said. Purple became Flemington Speedway. A campy annual event, “Purple Night,” involved fans competing for best-costume prizes at intermission. “The Purple Room,” the speedway’s after-hours club hosted by Kuhl for invited guests on Saturday nights, also evolved from that purple pace car. Some of Kuhl’s ideas came to him observing what others were doing. “When he ran the first Flemington 200, a lot of the other tracks were already running 200s. It brought Flemington Speedway to a certain level, of running a major race as others did,” Rick recalled. Other initiatives were tried-and-true techniques but with a different “Kuhl-spin.” To buttress the track’s weekly race teams by rewarding loyalty, Kuhl established an incentive system. “It was legitimate show-up money, based on your position in the point standings. Top ten, you got paid the week after for where you were coming into that race,” Rick shared. “We always tried to have a decent purse—that and top ten bonuses kept the drivers there,” he summed. Kuhl also owned and operated NJ’s Bridgeport Speedway for several years. “Our initial reason for buying Bridgeport was to stabilize Dirt Modified racing in the region. At the time we bought Bridgeport, we had no intention of paving Flemington. “Once we paved, we were now running a dirt track and a paved track. We did what we could, probably did the best of anybody who had been there before us. At some point, we felt we were no longer moving forward at Bridgeport and decided to sell it.” Paul Kuhl’s hands-on approach to racing promotion led many to believe his operation of the speedway was his occupation, which was not the case. He was Chairman of the Board of Kuhl Corp. in Raritan Township, NJ, a manufacturer and distributor of equipment for the poultry and food industries. He developed the ability to manage two successful, largely unrelated businesses and to do so seamlessly. “My father had a routine with working between the two companies. He would go over to the Fairgrounds in the afternoons to check on things. He had people he could rely on at both Kuhl Corp. and the Fairgrounds. He had a general manager at the Fairgrounds, several of them. I was the last one,” Rick said. At the end of the 1990 season, Paul Kuhl shocked the racing world with the news that the dirt track would be paved for the 1991 season. The paved Flemington Speedway allowed Kuhl to showcase a completely different brand of racing, augmented by ISMA Supermodifieds, ARCA Late Models and, from1995-98, the NASCAR Super Truck Series By Craftsman. The first NASCAR Truck race turned out to be the single most successful and best attended race in track history. “My father had a condo at Daytona and he and NASCAR’s Dennis Huth became friends. Huth took my father to see Bill France Jr. and they were trying to sell my father on taking a Truck Series race that first year. “That race wasn’t much of a gamble, honestly,” Rick said. “Between the TV money, event sponsorship, and ticket sales, income well exceeded the purse that year.” Due in part to the extensive relationships he cultivated with fellow race track operators, Paul Kuhl was named Auto Racing Promoter of the Year by Racing Promotion Monthly in 1991. Closing Flemington at the end of the 2000 season and selling the property was seen as a difficult but necessary move. The question often asked about Kuhl’s reign at Flemington was what his thoughts were when the final race was run, on September 1, 2000. Rick Kuhl expressed the family sentiment. “I have been asked that question a lot, I can address that from how I felt and I think my father must have felt. “He missed the social aspect, missed the racing aspect. But he didn’t miss the business aspect. We were putting in the best possible effort and still were losing money. Plus the property was more valuable being something else than what it was. “It was a question of what is in your heart and what is in your head. We were seeing this year after year for the last several years, and that allowed us to accept our decision.” Paul Kuhl passed away in July 2014 at the age of 87. Rick further reflected upon how he felt his father would want to be remembered by the racing community. “He was a promoter in the true sense of the word in that he liked different, sometimes crazy ideas. He wasn’t a man who just ran racing, he liked the entertainment aspect of it,” the son said. “He enjoyed being a promoter and was proud of what Flemington Speedway was able to become.”
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