Lernerville Speedway sports improvements for 2026 season
For five months a year, a small patch of Butler County comes alive with the sound of revving engines and thousands of screaming fans.
That patch is Lernerville Speedway, a part of Buffalo Township known by racing fans across the nation.
“Lernerville, right now, is probably one of the top 10 dirt tracks in the country,” said track manager Gary Risch, who also is a Buffalo Township supervisor. “Anywhere you go, everybody knows Lernerville all over the country. I was just down in South Carolina wearing my Lernerville shirts and people saw ‘Lernerville.’”
Fans will notice major improvements this season, according to both Risch and speedway general manager Greg Geibel, such as the addition of new bleachers to seat the roughly 10,000 who can fit inside the speedway grandstand.
“We're putting new bleachers in right now, replacing wooden bleachers with aluminum bleachers,” Risch said.
“There’s a lot of track prep that goes on during wintertime,” Geibel said. “Here at Lernerville Speedway, we're always working on big projects, whether it’s a big new billboard, or whether it's a new Victory Lane. This year, we’ve expanded parking some, and we’re also putting down some new aluminum bleachers. So there’s always big projects here at Lernerville.”
The track’s previous season ended in October. During the layoff, the Lernerville staff were hard at work making improvements to the facility and getting it ready for 2026.
The local Fab4 Racing series makes up the bulk of Lernerville’s schedule, with dates scheduled across nine consecutive Friday nights from April to June, and another six consecutive from July to August. Risch and Geibel said the drivers in the Fab4 series are hobbyists with full-time jobs who are racing simply for the love of racing.
“They have regular jobs, and I call them ‘weekend warriors,’” Geibel said. “They have normal jobs and then they bust their butts to get here on the weekends to race. They just treat it as a hobby.”
“It’s a very expensive hobby,” Risch said. “I always tell people, ‘You know how you make a small fortune in racing? You start with a big fortune.’”
The 0.4-mile dirt track, which held its first race in 1967, officially opened for this season of short-track racing Friday night, April 24, with the local Fab4 Racing series. Four classes of racing were featured that night: Peoples Sprints, Glassmere Late Models, Diehl Modifieds, and Pic-A-Part Pro Stocks.
However, Fab4 is far from the only series that runs events at Lernerville Speedway. A few larger, professional race circuits will stop by at least once in 2026, including High Limit Racing, the USAC National Sprint Car series and the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series.
“When we have the sprint car people come in, or High Limit ... they do it for a living,” Risch said. “But our average people every week don't do it for a living. It’s just a hobby.”
Each season, the showpiece event for Lernerville Speedway is the Firecracker 100, contested as part of the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series.
This year’s Firecracker 100 — to be held June 27 — is the climax of Firecracker Fest, a five-day carnival featuring three days of racing from both the Lucas Oil and the RUSH Late Model Series, as well as the Sportsman’s Bash on June 23, and a professional bull riding event on June 24.
“Three years ago, we turned it into a five-day event,” Geibel said. “On Monday, we have campers move in. We’ll have over 700 campers on site, and I think all the hotel rooms within like 30 miles from here are booked up for that week, too.”
The closest facility that hosts NASCAR racing on a national basis is Pocono Raceway in Monroe County, a four-and-a-half hour drive east. Despite this, Geibel said Butler County has a vibrant auto racing culture, and Lernerville taps into it each season.
“We’re blue collar. That’s what I love about dirt track racing,” Geibel said. “One of the reasons why NASCAR isn’t thriving like it used to is because the average blue-collar guy cannot associate with those drivers. They can't look at a hauler and say, ‘Oh yeah, that's Jeff Gordon's hauler,’ because their hauler colors are changing every week now.”
Drivers got a chance to get a feel for the track before the season officially kicked off, as Lernerville hosted a Friday night “test and tune” practice session April 17. Another one was scheduled for April 10 but was rained out.
“We let anybody and any type race. Even people that don't race on our track come here and practice,” Risch said.
Racing isn’t all that happens at Lernerville Speedway, as other organizations make use of the facility to host their events.
The Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank uses Lernerville as a base for food distributions once a month. On Sept. 3, the speedway is scheduled to host the Zerbini Family Circus.
For those who can’t get a ticket to the track, almost all races at Lernerville can be streamed live on dirt.TV, with the exception of larger races, such as the Firecracker 100, which can be streamed on FloRacing.
