AUBURN — Fans attending Saturday’s Circle M Ranch Speedway 60th Year Celebration had to notice the No. 9 coupe circling the track.
Powder blue with its top painted yellow, the doors sported the number 9 and the words “Hamburger Special.”
“Except the hamburger’s missing. I’ve got to put a picture of a hamburger on the door yet,” Rick Marburger said of the tribute to his father and former racer, Davey Marburger.
Marburger, of Gouglersville, said the car competed in the 1959 and 1960 seasons at the Reading Fairgrounds Speedway.
It also nearly met its demise shortly thereafter.
“That’s how I found it 20 years later, wrecked, and I built it up,” he said.
Now with a 1928 Chevrolet frame, a 1946 Ford engine and a 1933 Plymouth body, Marburger’s rebuilt car paraded before hundreds of fans who gathered Saturday for the fourth annual reunion.
Located at the western edge of Auburn, the Circle M Ranch Speedway was built by Ernie Mates and opened May 8, 1955. The quarter-mile track stayed open until the end of the 1958 season.
Saturday’s event was coordinated by the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing, York Springs. Several classes of cars ranging from quarter midgets to a modern two-seat modified turned laps under the guidance of Lincoln Speedway chief flagman Galen Kohler.
The event gave entrants a chance to become the role of race driver, if at reduced speed, for the day.
They included Grantville’s Nate Suhr, whose No. 44 jalopy came out first in a staged race of similar vehicles.
When it was over, the car sat in the infield with a box fan blowing air onto the engine to cool it.
“It’s a re-creation of Mitch Smith’s first race car in 1948,” the 33-year-old Suhr said. “My dad’s uncle owned the original car, so we cloned it as close as we possibly could. Hopped-up Model A motor, ’29 Model A body, a wagon wheel roll bar.”
Suhr, who previously worked with the staff at the defunct Silver Spring Speedway, said Saturday’s event allows him to stay connected to the sport.
“The fact that it’s as close as it is to going back in time,” he said. “That’s why we tried to make the car as accurate as possible. That’s really what it was like, the feeling.”
Leesport’s Merlin Miller also got to circle the track with a checkered flag after winning a staged feature for modified coupes.
But Miller knew much less about his No. 34, powered by a truck engine. All he knew about the original car is that he wanted to maintain the body in the rusted, dented condition in which he found it.
“Somebody will come up and say, ‘I remember that car,’ ” Miller said moments before that very thing happened. A Breinigsville man who offered to rebuild the car’s faltering transmission said the car originally raced in Virginia.
Miller said his father, Ray, was the original chief flagman when Circle M Ranch opened in 1955. Miller added his father would leave the flagstand some nights to race his own car.
Sixty years later, the roar of engines just west of Auburn returned for the day. The event is part of the Eastern Museum calendar of events.
Marburger, 61, said he enjoys the opportunity to attend many of them.
“This is closer and more fun here,” he said about the Circle M Ranch reunion. “Here, you can run faster. At Latimore (Valley Fairgrounds), you’re just putting around, pace-lapping.
“I like to see what they can do.”