PR: I got a chance to come up from Connecticut to Vermont as a kid. I got to Catamount Stadium a few times before it did close. I used to love going up there. I thought it was a great place. What were your impressions of that track?

DM: That was weird because Catamount and Thunder Road were separated by an hour and it might as well have been light years. There were so different. Thunder Road was high banked, short, quarter-mile. It was all about handling. You didn’t have to have a high-dollar motor. You didn’t have too have eight new tires. If you worked hard you could succeed at Thunder Road. I always looked at Catamount as more of a money track. If you had a Prototype Engine and you threw some tires at it you could go at Catamount. As kids we would go to Thunder Road on Thursday nights and Dave Dion was God and Bobby Dragon was the Anti-Christ. And then forty-eight hours later you would be at Catamount and the Dragon Brothers, who lived right there in Milton, were the Second Coming and Dave Dion was the enemy. It was so funny. You were an hour apart down the highway but it was two totally completely different worlds.

PR: How did you feel when Catamount closed? Sad to see it go?

DM: Everyone was sad to see it go. But we saw it coming too. The last two or three years that they ran Catamount they had already sold the land. What it came down to was that piece of land, however many acres it was, it sat five minutes from a major interstate, twenty minutes from the Canadian border, the land was worth so much more than they ever could have made by running it as a racetrack. And Catamount was sold to the developmental company, I think it was three years before it finally closed down. The owners had a leaseback deal. Until the developers came up with something they wanted to build on the site, they would continue to lease it back to them. We knew three years out that we probably had three or four more years and then that place was going to go away. The closer we got to it, the more it becomes a reality. We went there for that last race and everybody knew… and the place was packed… and it was a very emotional weekend. A lot of us had pretty much grown up at that place. And you knew that was going to be the last time around.

PR: There are a lot of parallels between that and when Danbury closed and became a mall. We all knew we were on borrowed time. Same situation. Very, very similar.

DM: Exactly right. The last thing the world needs is another industrial park. And to this day they run salt in all those old race fans’ wounds because if you go out to where that racetrack was there is big old warehouses and buildings everywhere but the banking for turns one and two is still right there. You can see the racetrack to this day. You wish they would just bulldoze the banking so you didn’t have to look at it. On my desk I have a chunk of asphalt from turn one at Catamount.

PR: How much local racing do you see now with the broadcast schedule you keep?

DM: You know I really don’t do much anymore. I’m fortunate enough that Thunder Road runs on Thursday nights so I can go check out a show as long as I don’t mind getting four hours sleep before I have to get up in the morning to head to the airport on Friday. I used to when I first got out on the road with MRN. On a Friday or Saturday night grab a couple of my buddies and go to a short track. But in all honesty, the caliber of the show being put on by most short tracks is so bad that I got disillusioned by it. I don’t go too much anymore. You go to these short tracks and they advertise a 7:30 start time. They finally get it cranked up at 8:20. They run a couple of heats and you sit on your hands for forty-five minutes while they have their “intermission”. They line all their features up heads-up based on time trials. Fastest guy in the front, slowest guy in the back. By the time they get to turn three on the first lap the lineup is complete. Nobody passes anybody. You are there half the night to run nine divisions that you can’t tell apart. It is to a point know where a lot of the short tracks out there are just so poorly run that, I’m ashamed to say it but, I don’t go to many of them anymore. Dick Berggren and I get into this every once in a while. We just start ranting and raving about the state of short track racing. There are a few out there that do it tremendously well. Stafford does, Thompson does, obviously Thunder Road does. There are short tracks around the country that still understand. But boy, a lot of them just don’t get it. There are a lot of promoters out there running really bad Saturday night short track programs that are convinced that their crowd sucks because Cup racing on TV is killing them. It isn’t Cup racing that is killing them. I have never seen a race on TV that was half of what a race was in person. They aren’t losing their crowd to TV. They are losing their crowd because they are putting on a lousy show. Too many promoters these days run their race program off the back gate. They figure if they can get enough race teams they can pay through the back gate. It’s become club racing and they’ve completely forgotten about the people who spend their money to come watch. They don't care about them anymore. Which is why they start an hour late and they waste everybody’s time and they’re more interested in selling hot dogs than they are race tickets. And then they wonder why nobody shows up after a while.

PR: I started listening to Sirius Speedway a few years ago when I got satellite radio. How did the show get started?

DM: Sirius radio had their generic stick-and-ball sports talk shows but they decided, about six years ago, to do a motorsports show. After some negotiation and looking around they came to MRN and said ‘We would like you guys to produce a motorsports show for us.’ Back then we were on their generic sports channel. We used to lead into World Soccer Daily. We used to joke on the air that there weren’t three fans that transitioned over from Sirius Speedway to World Soccer Daily. A stick-and-ball ‘Let’s talk about the NFL and major league baseball show’ would throw us to; we’d do our three hours of motorsports and hand off to World Soccer Daily. To make a long story short Sirius came to MRN and said we’d like you to produce a show for us. And the president of MRN David Hyatt contacted me, asked me if I would be interested in doing it. We batted it around for a while and decided we were going to do it. Unfortunately the way things are in business, by the time you get things negotiated out, it always takes a lot longer than you think it is going to, our first show was the day after Matt Kenseth won the Sprint Cup Championship at Homestead. Can you think of a worse time to debut a motorsports show? The season is over, let’s start talking about racing. The week we went on the air every driver was on a cruise ship or an airplane or an island somewhere. You couldn’t talk to anybody. The season was over, the excitement was done and here we are trying to ramp up a motorsports show. Somehow we got through it. We didn’t have but twelve listeners the first day. Little by little it caught on and after a couple of years the negotiations took place and the NASCAR package came to Sirius from XM. XM had it for the first couple of years and then Sirius decided they wanted to make a run for it. Sirius obtained the rights and we became Sirius NASCAR Radio. And then it was like the floodgates opened. I don’t know how many people listen to Sirius NASCAR Radio but there are a lot of them. We’d been on the air three years by the time most people discovered us. They’d be like ‘Hey there’s this new show… Well it ain’t as new as you think… We’ve been here for quite a while.’

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