Nowhere to ride
but the road
Colorado's deadliest year on record
I ride a 2012 Yamaha R6. The nearest real racetrack is 215 miles there and back, most of a day gone, and by the time you have paid entry, fuel, food and tyre wear you are out about $325. That is 22 hours of work at Colorado minimum wage for one day of riding legally. So people ride hard on the canyon roads instead, for free, at night. I have lost friends that way.
Colorado lost 165 riders in 2024. Not a bad month, not a rounding error, the highest number the state has ever recorded, on a trend that has been climbing for a decade. Motorcyclists are about 3 percent of the vehicles on Colorado roads and about 24 percent of the people who die on them.
SOURCE · COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION, 2025 AND 2026 RELEASES
Riders who want to find the limit will find it somewhere. Right now the only options around here are Rist Canyon, the Poudre and Highway 14, which have oncoming traffic, gravel, deer and no runoff. A racetrack has corner workers, an ambulance already parked on site, and nothing to hit but air fence.
wanting to go fast. You can give
them somewhere to do it that
does not kill them.
And nowhere to drag race either
When Bandimere Speedway closed at the end of 2023, the Front Range lost its only major drag strip. Nobody stopped drag racing. It moved onto public roads. Stunt riders face the same choice: an empty parking lot and a reckless driving charge, or nothing.
The entry fee is the small part
People hear "a track day costs $225" and think that is the number. It is not. The number that decides whether a rider goes is what leaves their account by the end of the day, and for most people here that is around $325.
TRIP DISTANCE CALCULATED FROM PUBLISHED CIRCUIT COORDINATES. COSTS BUILT FROM CURRENT ENTRY PRICING, COLORADO PUMP PRICES AND TYPICAL TYRE LIFE. THE FULL WORKING IS PUBLISHED WITH THIS PROJECT SO YOU CAN ARGUE WITH THE ASSUMPTIONS.
Why this is a safety number, not a money number
A rider who cannot justify $325 and half a weekend does not stop wanting to find the limit. They find it for free, ten minutes from home, at night, on a road with oncoming traffic and gravel in the corners.
Price is the mechanism that decides who gets to be safe. That is the whole argument for a local track, and it is why Fort Collins residents pay the least here by a wide margin.
The street is closing, and nothing opened
Fort Collins has spent the last two years tightening what you can do with a vehicle on its roads. Every one of those decisions is defensible on its own. Taken together they close the only outlet riders have, and put nothing in its place.
SOURCES · CITY OF FORT COLLINS ORDINANCES 086 AND 087, 2025, AND THE COUNCIL AGENDA ITEM SUMMARIES PUBLISHED WITH THEM.
None of that is unreasonable. People who live here are entitled to a quiet evening, and the complaints behind it are real. A rider leaving a stoplight hard at eleven at night is not making the case for us.
But look at what it adds up to from inside a helmet. A short pull, a wheelie, a bike that was loud when you bought it: any of it can now cost a fine, points, insurance, sometimes a court date. People are losing licences over a decision that took a second and a half. And the honest answer to "where should I do that instead" is currently a two hundred mile round trip, or nowhere.
out of a problem you have
given people nowhere else
to take.
This is an argument for the police, not against them
Enforcement works when there is somewhere to send people. Right now an officer in Fort Collins has one tool for a rider who wants to go fast, and it is a citation. That is a bad deal for everyone in the exchange, including the officer.
A circuit twenty minutes away changes the conversation from "stop doing that" to "do that on Saturday, at the track, where it is legal". Several jurisdictions already divert speeding and stunt citations into track schooling instead of fines. We want that option here, and we want to build the place that makes it possible.
Nobody ever finds out what they could have been
The rest of this page argues about money, and about people who die. This part is the one riders actually feel, and it is the honest reason most of us want this built.
Riding a motorcycle well is not a hobby in the way that word usually lands. It is a physical craft, and it is built the way every craft is built: by doing the same thing several thousand times, slightly better each time, right at the edge of what a person and a machine can do together. That edge is the only place the skill actually lives. On a public road, going to look for it is a felony, a funeral, or both.
What a road can teach you
Smoothness. Patience. Reading a surface. Assuming that the driver at the junction has not seen you and never will. All of it real, all of it worth having, and all of it learnable on the way to work.
What it cannot
Where the front tyre goes light under hard braking. What the bike says in the half second before it stops gripping. How to be fast on purpose instead of by accident. These are the skills that decide what happens when something goes wrong, and there is nowhere within two hours to practice a single one of them.
Colorado does have racing. The Motorcycle Roadracing Association runs a season of roughly seven weekends at High Plains Raceway out past Deer Trail, at Pueblo, and at Pikes Peak. Every one of them is a drive, and the nearest is the 215 mile round trip already counted further up this page. Racing rewards repetition more than it rewards anything else, so the riders who improve are the ones who can absorb the fuel, the days off, the van, the spare tyres and the entry fees, over and over, for years. That filter is real and it is expensive, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with talent.
A stopwatch is close to the fairest judge left in any sport. It does not care what you earn, who your parents are, what you look like, what you believe or who you know. You go out, you come back, and the number is the number. Northern Colorado has tens of thousands of riders and no way for any of them to put that question to a clock without giving up a day and most of a tank.
It is worse for anyone starting young. A fourteen year old in Fort Collins who wants to race has to be driven to another county before they can even begin, which means a parent has to decide it is worth doing before anybody has any idea whether the kid is any good. Most families look at that honestly and say no, and they are not wrong to. Somewhere in the ones who said no is a rider who would have been remarkable, and neither they nor anyone else will ever know it.
What a circuit does not do
It does not manufacture champions, and this page is not going to pretend it does. Most people who ride one will never race. Most who race will run mid pack for as long as they do it. A track near Fort Collins would not put a Coloradan on a MotoGP grid by itself, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
What it does is much smaller and much more important: it lets the question get asked. Somewhere to go on a Tuesday evening and take the same corner forty times in a row. Somewhere to line up against people who are better than you and find out by exactly how much. Do that for a few seasons across a whole region and some number of people discover they are far better than they had any way of knowing, a few of them turn out to be extraordinary, and everybody else simply goes home quicker and safer than they arrived. Which is where this page started.
RACE SEASON · MOTORCYCLE ROADRACING ASSOCIATION SCHEDULE, VIA MRA-RACING.ORG AND MOTORSPORTREG. ROUND TRIP DISTANCE · SEE SECTION 02.
Tracks make their regions money
A safety argument alone does not get a facility built. It does not have to, because this is one of the rare civic projects where the public benefit and the private return come out of the same asset.
Two American regions with no racing history to speak of built serious circuits, and both got paid for it.
SOURCES · ALABAMA NEWS CENTER 2015 · CIRCUIT OF THE AMERICAS VIA THE URBAN LAND INSTITUTE
What Fort Collins gets
Property and sales tax on 640 acres currently taxed at agricultural rates. Around 37 permanent jobs once it stabilizes, plus tenants and service staff. Two to three years of construction work. And a reason for people from Cheyenne, Denver and Nebraska to book hotel rooms on weekends that are currently quiet.
What investors get
An operating business doing roughly $9 million a year with about $1.9 million of EBITDA, across fourteen revenue lines so no single one sinks it. Under that, 640 acres of appreciating land in the I-25 corridor bought at agricultural prices. And naming rights before there is a reputation to price in.
The number I am not hiding
I checked my own model against how motorsports facilities actually perform, and it did not survive. My first version assumed a 37 percent margin. The published benchmark for this sector is about 18 percent, and the largest listed comparable runs lower than that. My sponsorship line was roughly three times what a facility this size earns. Corrected, the operating profit is about $1.9 million, not $4.3 million.
Worse, a $150 million facility depreciates by roughly $6.8 million a year. It wears out faster than it earns. At that build cost this does not work as a private investment, and no honest model says otherwise.
A smaller circuit, built to national rather than international standard on land shaped so it can be upgraded later, does clear the bar. That is the version I am now proposing, and it is the path Barber and PittRace both took. The full analysis, including the failed version, is published so you can check it yourself.
There is a cheaper argument too, and it is the one for the state. Colorado already spends money on motorcycle safety campaigns. A facility that puts 1,200 riders a year through structured schooling, and that can take speeding and stunt citations as diversion into track school instead of fines, is a safety program that generates tax revenue instead of consuming it.
What this city already funds
Fort Collins is not a town that refuses to spend money on places to be outside. It spends a great deal, deliberately, and it asks residents first. On 4 November 2025 voters extended the quarter cent capital tax for another ten years, and a quarter of that money is pointed at parks and recreation. Here is some of what is on the list, and what the city has bought recently.
SOURCES · CITY OF FORT COLLINS, COMMUNITY CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM · CITY OF FORT COLLINS ORDINANCE NO. 009, 2026 · OURCITY.FCGOV.COM, THE FUTURE OF HUGHES · CITY OF FORT COLLINS PARK PLANNING
What that does and does not prove
It does not prove there is money sitting there for a racetrack. That money is allocated, the projects on the list are good ones, and a circuit costs more than every recreation line on it put together. Nobody should read this as a case for taking the pool or the bike park.
What it proves is narrower and more useful. This city funds places to do things, at real scale, over and over, by public vote, and it decides what goes on the ballot by watching who asks. Paddlers asked. Cyclists asked. Pickleball players asked. In fifty years of that process, motorcyclists have never once asked. That is the gap this page exists to close, and it is why a list of names matters more here than an argument does.
What we are asking to build
A permanent road course of about three and a half miles, built to international standards from the start rather than built cheap and upgraded later.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Utah's Miller Motorsports Park spent around $100 million all at once, could not sustain it, and eventually sold for $18.5 million. Barber and PittRace grew in stages and are still here. So the racing surface gets built properly once, because you cannot cheaply upgrade a racing surface afterwards, and everything else arrives as it is earned.
Pricing is the whole point
A track that costs $345 a day does not solve the problem I am describing. It moves the problem to people with more money. So the price is tiered by where you live, and Fort Collins residents pay the least by a wide margin.
Why the tiers matter to the city, not just to riders
A Fort Collins address saves a regular rider about $3,400 a year against the out-of-state rate. That is a real, quantifiable reason to establish residency here rather than in Loveland or Cheyenne, and it is the kind of amenity a city can point to when it competes for people and the tax base that comes with them. Municipal golf courses, rec centers and state park passes all price this way already, so the mechanism is well understood and legally ordinary.
It also answers the obvious investor question. The local discount is not charity taken out of returns. It is funded by visitors from Denver, Wyoming, Nebraska and out of state, who pay market rate and also fill hotel rooms while they are here. Cheap for locals and profitable are the same strategy, not competing ones.
The schools
Colorado State, Front Range Community College and Aims all run programs that would benefit from a working facility: engineering, motorsports business, and mechanic certification with paying customers in the bays. Students graduate with a real venue on their résumé.
The land
The circuit needs about half of a 640 acre site. The rest can be restored shortgrass prairie, with noise berms doubling as spectator hills. A fixed percentage of revenue to Colorado conservation groups, written in before ground breaks.
A track is an employer, a classroom and a front door
A circuit is not only a place to ride. It is a permanent employer, a teaching facility, and the reason people from three states book a hotel room in a town they would otherwise drive past.
The jobs are real and they are not seasonal
A working circuit needs people every day of the year, not just on race weekends. Track maintenance and resurfacing crews. Safety and medical staff. Marshals and race control. Instructors. Mechanics and service technicians. Grounds and wildlife management. Front of house, food, retail, cleaning. Media, timing, broadcast. Bookings, sponsorship, administration and finance.
Most of those are trades, not desks, and most of them are hard to offshore. A tarmac crew in Larimer County stays in Larimer County.
Colorado State is twenty minutes away
The thing a university programme cannot buy is a real venue with real customers and real deadlines. This would be one, on the doorstep. Engineering students with a vehicle dynamics problem that is not hypothetical. Business students running events with actual budgets. Journalism and media students producing broadcast from a live meeting rather than a simulation. Sports medicine working trackside. Hospitality running a paddock.
Front Range Community College and Aims run the certifications that put people straight into work. Mechanic and technician programmes with paying customers in the bays teach faster than any classroom does. A graduate who has run a race weekend has something on a résumé that a graduate who has read about one does not.
The businesses that already exist here come first
The intent is to buy locally and visibly. Dealerships for demo fleets, service and parts. Independent shops for fabrication, suspension, tyres and machining. Local food rather than a single national catering contract. Local printers, local signage, local trades on the build.
A circuit that imports its whole supply chain is a landlord. One that spends into the businesses already on College and Mulberry is infrastructure. The second is what gets built here, and the intention is to write that into the operating agreement rather than leave it to goodwill.
The companies with the balance sheets are already in town
Fort Collins and the corridor around it host serious engineering employers. Naming rights, a sponsored corner, an engineering partnership, a scholarship, an apprenticeship pipeline: these are ordinary marketing and recruitment spends for companies of that size, and unusually good value before a facility has a reputation to price in.
Nobody has been approached yet, and nothing here should be read as an existing relationship. It is a list of the obvious conversations to have, published so it is transparent rather than a surprise.
Work with the ground, not against it
Most circuits are drawn flat and then bulldozed into existence. Northern Colorado does not need that. The elevation here is the asset, and the cheapest way to build a good circuit is to let the land decide the corners.
Following existing contours instead of flattening them means less earthmoving, less cost, less disruption, and a better track. Elevation change is what separates a circuit people travel for from one they tolerate. Barber and Road America are loved for their topography. Flat circuits are not.
An honest word about "eco friendly"
Motorsport burns fuel. Calling a racetrack green would be the kind of claim this project has spent its whole existence refusing to make. What can honestly be said: the site can be built to disturb less ground, restore more habitat than it takes, keep its water on site, keep its light out of the sky, and hold electric race classes as they mature. That is a real standard and it can be measured. "Carbon neutral racetrack" is not, and will not appear here.
Build what the numbers support, on land that can take more
The honest position, and the one the financial model actually supports.
A full international grade build, the kind that could host a world championship round from day one, does not survive its own debt service at the cost it would take here. That finding is published in this project's own analysis and it has not been softened. Utah's Miller Motorsports Park spent around $100 million at once, could not carry it, and eventually sold for $18.5 million.
So the plan is the other one, and it is the path Barber and PittRace both took. Build the racing surface properly once, to national standard, on a parcel and a geometry that could be upgraded later. Run-off, barriers, drainage and site area sized so that a future upgrade is a permitting exercise rather than a demolition.
Locals first, permanently, in writing
If this ever does host a marquee event, the risk is obvious: the town that built it gets priced out of it. That happens, and it is how a community asset becomes a tourist facility that locals resent.
The protection is contractual, not sentimental. Resident pricing tiers, a guaranteed number of open local days per year, founding memberships that cannot be revalued, and free spectating on club days. Written into the operating agreement before ground breaks, not promised afterwards.
Milestones
Public support from people whose judgement carries weight, published word for word, with their photograph, once they have given it. Nothing goes in this section until it has actually been given.
This section is empty on purpose
No official, department or organisation has endorsed this project. There are no conversations to report yet.
When someone does go on the record, their exact words appear here unedited, with their name, their title and the date. If they later withdraw, the entry comes down. Nothing implied, nothing paraphrased, nothing borrowed from a photograph taken at an unrelated event.
INTENDED APPROACHES INCLUDE THE CITY OF FORT COLLINS, LARIMER COUNTY, FORT COLLINS POLICE SERVICES, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY AND LOCAL MOTORCYCLE BUSINESSES. LISTING AN INTENTION TO ASK IS NOT A CLAIM THAT ANYONE HAS AGREED.
What does not exist yet
Every number on this page is an estimate, and you should hear that from me rather than find it out yourself.
- No land. No site optioned or purchased. Acreage and cost figures come from agricultural listings east of I-25, roughly $8,000 to $24,000 an acre.
- No legal entity. Nothing incorporated, so no money is being collected. Signing below costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
- No feasibility study. The real next step, and it costs $250,000 to $500,000. Every serious funder asks for one first, and every figure here defers to it.
- The financial model is mine, not an accountant's. Published in full so anyone can check the assumptions and tell me where they are wrong. I would like to know.
- No insurance quote, no noise study, no traffic study. The three things that kill track proposals at county hearings, and they need doing early.
- No name. The one at the top is a working title. Naming it before it exists felt like getting ahead of ourselves.
If that list makes this sound early, it is early. Which is exactly why signatures matter more right now than money does.
Put your name on it
City councils and investors ask the same question first: does anybody actually want this?
A list of ten thousand named Northern Colorado residents answers that in a way no argument can. No payment, no commitment, and the list will not be sold or shared.
If you work for the city, county, state or a company here
The ask at this stage is not a check. It is help funding a feasibility study, or a letter saying this deserves examination. Both are worth more right now than money, because they unlock everything else. I am at karldu45@gmail.com and I will meet anyone anywhere.
Share it, and you are in the draw
Signing puts you in. Every person who signs through your link puts you in again. Prizes are riding gear, helmets, jackets, gloves and boots, drawn at random and posted to you.
Your share link
Send this to anyone who rides. Every signature through it is another entry for you.
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. OPEN TO COLORADO RESIDENTS OF LEGAL RIDING AGE. FULL RULES TO BE PUBLISHED BEFORE ANY DRAW IS CONDUCTED.
Pledge, do not pay
There is no legal entity yet, so there is nothing that can lawfully take your money, and nothing here will ask for a card. What you can do is say what you would put in when there is.
What happens to this money, which is currently nothing
No account exists. No card is stored. No processor is connected. If an entity is ever formed, everyone who pledged gets an email explaining exactly what was formed, who controls it, and what the money would be spent on, and nobody is charged anything without saying yes again at that point.
The first real expense is an independent feasibility study, which costs between $250,000 and $500,000. Every dollar in and every dollar out will be published on this site, itemised. A project that asks for public trust and keeps private books does not deserve the first thing.