Photo by Erin Nelson
Chase McMaster, owner and founder of Chase Bays, stands in his warehouse in the Trussville Industrial Park on Jan. 6.
Sometimes, questions don’t require drawn-out answers.
Has Chase McMaster, the president of Chase Bays in Trussville, dreamed of opening a motorsports track?
“Yeah,” McMaster said.
Simple as that. McMaster has been working toward this goal since 2014, and his company is on the cusp of it now in Trussville. McMaster started the idea of a motorsports park in 2014, when Chase Bays was located in Birmingham. Steel City Motorsports Park was the name, and McMaster even started a crowdfunding website to raise funds toward a $248,000 goal. It made, according to a Kickstarter.com goal, $2,667 from 25 donors.
But what is a lofty number compared to a longtime dream?
“This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time because I understand the market, and I understand the industry, and I know that this fills a void that is insanely needed for this industry,” McMaster said. “I’ve done extensive research on what it does to a city, and it’s never bad.”
Photo courtesy of McMaster Motorsport Park
A rendering of the proposed McMaster Motorsport Park.
Chase Bays, which specializes in designing and manufacturing fluid transfer products for the aftermarket automotive industry, recently posted on Facebook and Instagram about plans for McMaster Motorsports Park in the Trussville Industrial Park off U.S. Highway 11. The plan calls for a 25-foot to 30-foot wide one-mile track with varying levels of elevation change for racing and drift use. Other plans for the track and accompanying land include:
- 50-plus truck/trailer spots for driver paddock
- 250-plus car spectator parking lot
- Numerous spectator viewing zones around the track
Two 60,000-square-foot flex commercial buildings neighboring the track made for motorsport-based businesses. The buildings would be split for numerous tenants at 10,000 to 30,000 square feet each.
McMaster said that before Chase Bays bought property in Trussville in August 2021, he and several others tested the sound of cars from varying points near the Trussville Industrial Park, including the Stockton neighborhood. Because noise is a concern many Trussville residents will have and have already expressed on social media, Chase Bays plans to engineer walls that absorb sound much like the ones along the interstate in Atlanta.
McMaster said use of the track for product testing would be on weekdays, with no more than two cars at a time, for a projected maximum of two hours per day and not past 5 p.m. He predicted that testing on the track would be one or two days per week for a minimum of 30 minutes and a maximum of two hours for each of those days.
Additionally, McMaster said, McMaster Motorsports Park would host five city-approved weekend events per year, at least two of which would be drifting events.
“Instead of having numerous small events throughout the year, you’d have one big event so that you pack in all the noise in one event, and you bring in more spectators, more entertainment for the city, you bring in more drivers,” McMaster said.
He said he would be “open” to “quiet events,” too, such as 5K runs, small festivals and student driver training.
“This isn’t going to turn into chaos for the area,” McMaster said. “There’s not going to be people rolling through the neighborhoods all the time. This is something that will be strictly planned.”
McMaster said he had an initial meeting with the Trussville Planning and Zoning Board to review early plans for the track. The Industrial Development Authority, he said, would ultimately decide any recommendations to put forward to the Trussville City Council. McMaster is a member of the authority, but would abstain from any potential vote on the matter. No official votes from any board or council have taken place yet.
He said that he hopes that process unfolds over the next few months and ground can be broken for the motorsports park in September.
“I’m motivated, and I’m ready to go,” he said.
McMaster said it would be “fair” to say that it would take approximately six months to build the track. During that time, the plan would be to get the two commercial buildings developed and filled by summer 2023. It could bring as many as 100 jobs to Trussville.
“That’s the ultimate goal, to bring more jobs to the city,” McMaster said.
