The unofficial start to summer may be two weeks away, but it will start to feel like summer when the green flag drops to start the auto racing season Friday night at Brown County Speedway, Aberdeen.

Hours and hours of preparation will be put to official use when the first of three-plus months of action begins at the local track.

“It’s going to be a great year,” said veteran racer and track official Kent Arment. “We’re all excited.”

Arment said there will be a few surprises this season at BCS.

“It’s crazy, but I think we’re going to have four to five new Late Models possibly, out here,” Arment said. “I know of at least three.”

As usual, there are many big shows that dot the summer schedule, although one in particular has a new date. The annual Rumble will move back a week or two into July.

“We try to keep it away from the Fourth of July just a little bit,” Arment said.

He also noted that area tracks work together to stay off of each other’s dates.

“We also have to worry about everybody all over the WISSOTA country running their big specials, too,” Arment said, “so scheduling is a really hard deal in this sport anymore.”

Another thing that’s a really hard deal is trying to keep the track in tip-top shape for competition. There are a variety of elements involved.

“There’s a lot more to it than most people realize,” said track official Terry Voeltz. “When Kent came on board, and he started helping me do a lot out there, and he was just amazed at what all he had to do.”

Voeltz said there are different parts of the track that need more water and some that need less.

“For example, one thing that most people would never think of is the front straightaway, if you’re not careful, is always way wetter than the rest of the track. Well, that’s because the grandstand blocks the sun,” Voeltz said. “The same thing on the east end vs. the west end. The sun gets over the west and the banking of the track, the sun doesn’t hit it. It’s incredible what’s all involved in it.”

Arment, who loves the thrill of racing, also has to come to appreciate what it takes to get a track ready for action. He has learned under the guidance of Voeltz.

“I am amazed. You think it’s easy. You need the track wetter, you lay water on it, but he’s right,” Arment said. “It’s a 10-minute window sometimes … We’ll be amazed. I’ll be running for the water truck and he’s like it’s already too wet, and I get out there I’m blowing dust. You’ve really got to be close to it and on it. It’s really a tricky deal. I enjoy it just like I enjoy racing. I really like doing that track prep.”

Last year, officials brought in loads of new dirt to help improve the racing surface. That proved to turn out well.

“We weren’t quite sure what it was going to do,” Voeltz said, “and we mixed it in really good with the old stuff and it worked out really well.”

Of course, it’s one thing to have new dirt; it’s another thing to know what to do with it. Officials will groom the track prior to feature races in an attempt to make multiple lanes of racing available for the main events.

“We have an intermission and we figured out during that time, if we work the top and the bottom and just leave the middle alone, that we end up having a pretty good race all the way across the track,” Voeltz said. “I know that we’ll have a good cushion on top and have some good traction on the bottom. We have drivers that like to race on dry-slick. We leave it that way through the middle. A lot of that has to do with Kent and the guys down on the track, looking at it to see what it needs.”

There are no plans in the works to add more dirt again this season, although Voeltz said that many tracks do add dirt annually.

“It gets to be very expensive, and takes a lot of time and a lot of work,” he said, “so we haven’t always done it annually, but there are tracks that add to the dirt every single year. We can tell by working with it, looking at it, how it is.”

Among the other big shows on this year’s schedule is a sprint car race set for June 28.

“It’s promising to be the biggest one we’ve had,” Voeltz said.

Arment said the show, which combines two sanctioning bodies of sprint cars together, could produce as many as 30 sprinters that evening.

“Now, I don’t know if we’ve ever had that many sprint cars,” Arment said. “That’s a pretty big show.”

The schedule concludes with back-to-back nights of season championship races, and then finishes up with two nights of the Big Buck Nationals.

All of the racing will be concluded by the end of August.

In the past, there have been shows as late as October at the local track, but Arment said the current schedule allows drivers to go to other big shows on the WISSOTA schedule.

“To pull up early, there’s nothing wrong with that. It gives your guys time to go out,” Arment said. “We’ve got the WISSOTA 100, which is usually the second weekend in September. It gives them a week to get ready for that. It’s actually a good thing for our guys to let them go a little bit, let them go run around.”

In all, there are 17 nights of racing action scheduled for Brown County Speedway, and officials, drivers and fans are ready for the first green flag to drop.

“It’s going good out there,” Arment said. “We’re pretty happy with everything.”