# Merritt Speedway _A three-eighths-mile clay oval off Houghton Lake Road that has run Saturday-night stock cars since 1968._ The Modifieds come off turn four and the ground moves. You feel it in the aluminum bench before you hear it — a low shove up through the soles of your feet — and then the noise arrives all at once and takes the top of your head off. Clay dust hangs in the lights. It smells like methanol and cut grass and somebody’s fryer, and under all of it, the particular cold of a northern Michigan night coming down after a warm day. This is Merritt Speedway. A three-eighths-mile clay oval off East Houghton Lake Road, ten minutes from the house, running stock cars on Saturday nights the way it has since 1968. It opened in 1968 and it stuck — the kind of decision that sounds insane until you watch it work for half a century. The place has changed hands and had real money and effort poured into it in recent years, and in 2025 it did the thing nobody up here saw coming. It [joined the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series](https://www.nascar.com/news-media/2025/03/10/merritt-speedway-joins-nascar-weekly-series/). First season under the sanction. The Late Models run as the top division now, which means the points a driver earns on this clay in Missaukee County feed a national ladder. That is a strange sentence to write about a track ringed by hayfields. It is also true. Don’t come for the NASCAR of it, though. Come for the dirt. Pavement racing is a clean, geometric thing. Dirt is not. Dirt is a negotiation — the track changes every twenty minutes as the cars pull the moisture out of it, tacky at the start of the night and slick and gray by the feature, and the drivers who win are the ones reading a surface that will not hold still. You watch a Late Model get sideways off two, catch it, carry the slide through the corner on purpose, and you understand that the sloppiness is the skill. IMCA Modifieds. Pro Stocks. Factory Stocks, the four-cylinders, and the Mini Wedges — small kids in small cars, which is either endearing or a warning, I haven’t decided. Logistics. Racing runs Saturdays through the season, which is roughly May into September — the 2025 opener dropped its green flag in mid-May, and northern Michigan being what it is, an early-season night can bite. Pit gates open at 3. Grandstand gates at 4. The green flag on the first heat comes around 6:30, and if you want the front stretch you show up before that, because the good benches fill and the aluminum goes hard on your back either way. Bring a cushion. Bring cash for the gate. Bring ear protection you’ll feel embarrassed about right until the first Late Model heat, at which point you’ll feel like a genius. The drive is the easy part. [Merritt](https://roamstays.com/location/merritt/) and the track sit close, and from one of our [Michigan log cabin rentals](https://roamstays.com/type/log-cabin/), [Paradise Pines Retreat](https://roamstays.com/properties/paradise-pines-retreat/), it’s about ten minutes of two-lane, the last stretch past dark fields and then the glow of the place visible from half a mile off. Park in the grass. Follow the noise. What you’re buying, for the price of a gate ticket, is three or four hours of other people’s competence. The pit crews. The flagman. The announcer who’s been up in that booth long enough to know the regulars’ kids by name. Nobody in that infield is getting rich. They’re doing it because the alternative — a Saturday night in June with nothing loud happening — is worse. Bring the kids if you have them. The Mini Wedges will ruin them for quieter hobbies, and the noise means you can say anything you want and no one hears it. Bring a jacket whatever the forecast says. The dust gets into everything and stays a week — the truck, your hair, the good jacket you shouldn’t have worn. By the feature the track’s gone slick and the fast line has crept up to the wall, and the leaders are running an inch off the concrete at speeds that make no sense for dirt. Cold air now. The smell’s turned to pure fuel and clay. You’ll find dust in the cupholder Wednesday. Leave it. --- - Property page: https://roamstays.com/field-notes/merritt-speedway/ - Markdown: https://roamstays.com/field-notes/merritt-speedway.md - Last updated: 2026-08-07 - Site index (for AI): https://roamstays.com/llms.txt _A machine-readable copy of this page. Prices and availability, where shown, are live on the property page._