By Randy Whitehouse,Staff Writer
Majority owner Bill Ryan makes sure things keep humming at the auto racing track.

OXFORD – If you want to talk to Bill Ryan and you’re in the immediate vicinity of Oxford Plains Speedway today, you’re probably better off staying where you are rather than searching all around the track.

He’ll be coming your way sooner or later.

The 37-year-old Ryan will be everywhere during his speedway’s signature event, the TD Banknorth 250. One minute you might find him directing traffic, the next, entertaining sponsors, then later, in the pits listening to a racer’s rantings.

It’s a hectic conclusion to a draining week for omni-present track owner.

“From the important to the mundane, from the sublime to the ridiculous. It runs the gamut,” Ryan said of the week leading up to the race. “By Sunday, I’m the happiest guy in the world when the race is over and it’s successful. I feel it by the end of the week.”

Now in his seventh year as the track’s majority owner, Ryan finds that many of the details don’t sneak up on him as they once did. Often, that’s because of his staff, which has helped turn the speedway into a more efficient operation than the one he inherited.

But that doesn’t mean that Ryan is ready to leave all of those details to others.

“You have to be there,” he said. “It’s an extraordinarily tough business.”

Not that he needs it, but Ryan is reminded just how tough when he attends winter or spring conferences with the owners of the 900 other speedways like his across the country.

“Sometimes the promoter will ask for a show of hands of all of the first-year owners. You see hundreds of hands come up, and what that tells you is that there’s hundreds of other people that just got out of the business,” he said. “There is an incredible turnover rate because everybody thinks that it’s a license to print money.”

“It’s hard to make the economics work,” he added, “so sometimes I think people go for quick fixes and short-term kind of thinking.”

On his rare breaks from OPS, Ryan will sometimes visit other short tracks, and he often leaves scratching his head.

“I go as a fan and I’m like, Why are they doing this?'” he said.

He recalls going to one well-known short track recently and thinking that the majority of the customers weren’t getting their money’s worth.

“At race time they announced that they had a big traffic jam outside of the facility, and they were going to have a half-hour delay to the start of the race,” he said. “They come back on a half-hour later and say there’s a major tie-up, they’re going to wait another half-hour before they race.”

“Three times they came on and said to people that were already in there that they were going to delay it. They started the race an hour-and-a-half after it was supposed to start. Now, for the fans that are already there, how can you do that to your customers? Yeah, sure, you feel bad for the people that are coming in late and maybe they get to the gate and see that you’ve started and turn away, but that’s selfish in my mind, short-term selfishness by the track, to do that, because I wouldn’t go to that show again.”

To Ryan, that is one of the cardinal sins of track ownership. The customer should always want to come back.

The changes that he’s made at OPS reflect that philosophy. He’s tried to attract more families with contests, a mascot, Blues Brothers impersonators and, a recent addition, an above-ground pool to the infield that racers are coaxed to take a post-race dip into.

“To keep people’s attention, you have to do different things,” he said. “You have to be willing to change.”

A former sports marketing attorney, Ryan orchestrated one of his biggest marketing coups last year by inviting Nextel Cup drivers Kurt Busch and Matt Kenseth to the 250. Kenseth and Busch’s younger brother Kyle are racing today.

The strategy behind it is to get the armchair racing fan off the sofa and to the track.

“There are a lot of people out there that racing begins and ends with NASCAR. A lot of them have never even been to the track. They watch it on television,” he said. “We got a lot of fans to come to the race last year (because of Kenseth and Busch). You draw those people in, and as exciting as that race was last year, you’ve got to be kidding me if they’re not coming back this year.”

Other short track owners have given up trying to draw NASCAR fans, lamenting the increasing presence of Saturday night races on the Nextel Cup schedule. But Ryan thinks that many of those fans may ultimately be searching for the entertainment value of short track racing.

“NASCAR’s created 100 times the fan base that was in racing 20 years ago. I look at it as a positive. I try to capitalize on that,” he said. “Yeah, sure they’re competing with us. But what we do is way more exciting. I think a short-track race is 100 times more exciting than a Cup race. It’s a little bit of a short attention span thing. On a typical night, you may be watching a race and think it’s a snooze. But guess what? It’s going to be over in 20 laps and another one will be on.”

If the fast-paced nature of short track racing won’t reel in the customers, the variety of events at the track will. In the past, the schedule has included freestyle moto-cross or monster trucks. Next month, the NASCAR Busch North series, which began at OPS, will return.

Ryan will try practically anything if he thinks it will fill the seats.

“It’s all trial and error,” he said. “What I love about what I do is I throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.”

He craves instant feedback. At the end of the night, he’ll often stand by the ticket booth and talk with fans as they walk out, fielding questions, complaints or compliments with equal affability.

“Either people will say,That was really cool. That was great racing.’ or That pool thing was ridiculous,'” he said.

“I just want to make it as fun as possible for people so they walk out of there with a smile on their face,” Ryan added. “If they walk out with a smile on their face, that means that they’re going to come back, and that means that I’ve done my job.”