RAPID CITY - You work the soil and hope there's enough water, all the while keeping a wary eye on the sky.

While this sounds more like working a farm or tending a garden, it also applies to preparation of a dirt- or clay-surface racetrack for auto racing.

"It's kind of like having a race car. If you work on the car, you're going to have a fast race car. If you work on the track all week, you'll have a fast race track," said Black Hills Speedway manager Bill Keester, who boasts 30 years of involvement in racing, both as a driver and track manager.

Proper track preparation helps keep the dust down for spectators and helps with driver visibility. Just the right amount of moisture in or near the track surface also means faster racing by providing what the drivers call "tack."

Old newspaper accounts of racing included attempts to quell dust by dumping thousands of gallons of used motor oil on a track, a definite environmental no-no these days.

The practice nowadays means blading the track followed by several days of applying water to the surface and hoping for cool weather and a midweek rain shower or two to help keep the soil moisture level up.

If a track surface is too dry, dust is not the only issue. Car set-up becomes a challenge as drivers try to make their cars handle what's known as a dry-slick, rightfully compared to driving on ice.

A damp track is preferred by most drivers, but with rain sometimes there can be too much of a good thing, as happened at Black Hills Speedway in recent weeks.

"If Mother Nature helps you out, that's good. The past two weeks, the track has been just saturated, 6 to 8 inches of clay moving around, and when it's like that there's nothing you can do with it," Keester said. "All you can do is try to keep the infield dry so we can get cars in and out of there."

Black Hills Speedway, like all dirt race tracks, has its own idiosyncrasies.

For more than a decade, the speedway property has been part of a flood-control drainage easement for Rapid

Valley, meaning the track infield collects runoff from heavy rains, like a giant bowl.

"We get the drainage from the valley in the pond, coming underneath the race track and bubbling up through the drains," Keester said. "A lot of times we can't have races because of the flooding of the infield, not because of the track itself."

Keester said a typical week's track prep involves blading the track to spread loose dirt from the outside of the track back to the typically hard-packed lower racing grooves and smoothing out any ruts and ripples that developed.

From there, Keester and his track crew apply thousands of gallons of water, mostly during evening hours to avoid evaporation.

"In the dry years, you just water, water, water," Keester said. "It's a pretty intense chore."

The past couple of weeks revealed another little known facet of track prep: Sometimes moisture deep in the soil will work to the surface in the cool of the evening.

"You might be a little dusty for the heat races, but once the sun goes down that moisture comes right back up. That's what happened the last couple of weeks," Keester said.

A late-afternoon deluge on Friday forced postponement of the races to Sunday night, mostly because of run-off collecting in the infield.

"It's South Dakota, so you can get a rain shower like that now and again, but it's not like the old days when the racetrack would shed the water. It isn't because we're not trying to do the best we can. We just don't want to get a bunch of race cars in the middle of this pond and get them stuck," he said.

And like farmers or any other weather-

dependent enterprise, Keester side he's tried to do the best he can with the hand dealt.

"We're not apologizing for the race track the last couple of weeks, because Mother Nature dished it out to us, I want everyone to know that our guys work their tails off out here every week, with no pay, just to be able to put on a show for the racers and fans. Without all those guys, we'd be three weeks in a row without any racing."