I grew up in East Peoria, Illinois. East Peoria was and is a small, blue collar industrial town. The area is home to the world headquarters of the Caterpillar Tractor Company. I regularly ate my lunch from 3 a.m. to 3:20 a.m. seated in a D9 tractor while working the graveyard shift at "Cat" and earning money for college. I graduated from Northern Illinois University in 1971 with a B.S. in management. With a low military draft lottery number I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps following graduation. When I was finished with active duty, I started a sales career with Richardson-Vicks, Inc. RVI sold the Vicks line of cough and cold products as well as Oil of Olay, Clearasil and Pantene hair care products among other consumer items. In 1985, RVI was acquired by Procter & Gamble. P&G is the 13th largest company in the world. I switched over from sales to product supply/logistics for the last ten years of my career. I retired in 2002 after my family and I had lived and worked in Peoria, Illinois; Cincinnati, Ohio; Phoenix, Arizona; Mission Viejo, California; Ridgefield, Connecticutt; Inverness, Illinois and Laguna Niguel, California. My family and I finally settled in the "little Spanish city by the sea", San Clemente, California.
We have three very successful grown children. When I'm not trackchasing, I spend my time with financial planning, aerobic exercise, golf and travel with my wife. We're also big UCLA fans, since all of our children graduated from this fine university. We go to most of their football and basketball games.
I started my interest in racing as a small boy in East Peoria. I grew up in a lower middle class neigborhood with 10 houses on our block. It was my good fortune that three of the houses were home to racecars! On Saturday morning, it was like gasoline alley as the cars were prepared for that evening's racing action at the old Peoria Speedway at the Mt. Hawley Airport. I spent many Saturday nights with my mother at the track. I did not see my second track until I was 14 years old. Although I liked racing, I did not go to very many new tracks during my college years. During my twenties, I was a "racechaser". I went to racing events where the best races were being held.
As time went by I began to travel for business reasons. I would travel on a national basis. Many times the business meeting would end at some resort in just about any part of the country on a Friday afternoon. I might stay over in the area for a day or two and watch the races. Also in 1992 our "hometown" track, Ascot Park closed. My wife and I went to Ascot on a very frequent basis and now there was no quality local track to attend. I found out that I liked traveling a little bit more than I liked the racing action. It was more fun for me to travel to a new location and see a race than to travel to an old location and see a race. My trackchasing career was born.
As the kids began to leave the house and pursue their own careers, the time I had devoted to their activities was freed up for my wife and I to travel. We have traveled all over the world for non-racing entertainment. Now that I am retired there are no time restrictions on my trackchasing. This time freedom manifested itself in a record year of trackchasing in 2004. I went to 127 new tracks, breaking the record of 114 held by Madison, Wisconsin's Ed Esser. In 2005, I broke my existing record with a grand total of 182 new tracks. I followed up that best ever year by seeing 147 new tracks in 2006 and another 160 new tracks in 2007. That's 616 new tracks in the past four years. I have traveled about 730,000 miles since the start of 2004 to make that happen. My trackchasing has taken me to all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia. I have trackchased in these 15 foreign countries: Australia, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Jamaica, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand and the United Kingdom.
My trackchasing goals for the future are very simple. I would like to be the first person in modern day trackchasing history to finish in the top 3 of the worldwide trackchaser annual standings for nine consecutive years. No one else has ever done that in trackchasing. With more and more people all across the world beginning to show a real interest in seeing a large number of tracks this will be difficult.
So, that's it. I hope to see you somewhere down the trackchasing road!
Thanks for visting my website!
Randy Lewis
World's #1 Ranked trackchaser
