Like most kids, Clayton Mortensen dreamed of racing cars. 

Mortensen’s childhood trips to Meridian Speedway and fairground motorsports events usually went about the same each time. 

“I’d just tell myself, ‘someday I’ll be out there,’” said Mortensen, now 26. “It’s always been a dream. I even wrote it down in a notebook when I was a teenager.”

This month, Mortensen will live his dream of being “out there” as United Rallycross (URX), Idaho’s newest stock car racing series, kicks off on July 18 at Lost River Raceway in Blackfoot. 

Mortensen is not just racing in the event, though—he and his brother-in-law Preston Howell founded the race series and spent the last year transforming an abandoned motocross track into a racetrack fit for up to five stock cars at a time. 

“The rallycross that we have in America is just one car, usually around cones or something, which is cool, but we wanted to race other cars,” Mortensen said. “So, we were just sitting around after dinner one night and were like, ‘what if we started our own race?’”

What started as a half-hearted joke soon turned into Howell and Mortensen looking for land to build a racetrack. As luck would have it, they found the ideal property—and it was for sale. 

The 212-acre parcel was permitted for a racetrack in 2000, but the project never made it off the ground. An old dirt motocross track and some bleachers were all that remained when Howell and Mortensen first saw the property last summer. They were sold. 

Then, the work began. Almost immediately. 

Mortensen, an excavator by trade, started by renting a bulldozer to build the track, which spans three-quarters of a mile and features a series of twists, turns, and hills. 

Dirt was piled into a large hill for elevated spectator seating, while more than two decades worth of junk and debris that had collected on the property was hauled away.

“On top of just building the track, we also had to build a business and a whole new series,” Howell said. “So there’s everything that goes into it on the back end of that.”

Mortensen and Howell recruited 30 drivers—including themselves—to race in the inaugural season for United Rallycross. They’ve also been busy promoting this year’s four events, as well as developing an extensive set of rules and regulations for the series. 

“It’s been a ton of work,” Mortensen said. “The more we opened the can of worms, the bigger the can was, it seemed.”

Entry level racing

“Skill over budget” is the premise around which United Rallycross is built. The entry-level series is designed to be accessible for amateur racers, while still providing a professional rally car racing experience. 

Regulations strictly limit aftermarket upgrades on a field of racecars consisting of common builds like the Subaru Impreza, the Honda Civic, or the Ford Focus. For around $7,000, everyday drivers like these can be equipped with mandatory safety equipment, like roll cages, neck braces, and fire suits. 

“You do have to put some skin in the game,” Mortensen said. “It’s not the cheapest thing in the world. It’s still racing.”

Some details are still being worked out, but the series will feature three different racing classes: two-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, and baja bugs. Each class will have three heats per round with four laps each heat. 

Howell and Mortensen admit that the process of building the series from scratch has been tedious. Sometimes, they wonder if they are crazy for pouring more than 1,000 hours into the endeavor since buying the track. But then, deep in the backs of their minds, an inner-child nudges them on. 

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t going to race,” Mortensen said. “That’s why we’re doing this.”

In time, Howell and Mortensen hope that United Rallycross will spread to other venues in Idaho and across the country. They’ve studied business strategies that vaulted NASCAR into the automotive juggernaut it is today and believe they can harness the same strategies to make URX successful.  

But for now, they are singularly focused on July 18. They are focused on winning not just as racers, but as business owners eager to see if it was the right move to go all in on a dream. 

They remain confident it will all pay off. At the very least, it will be a bit of fun. If all goes well, however, they will inspire the same dreams that led them here in the first place. 

“I think a lot of kids are going to like it,” Mortensen said. “Hopefully we’ll create a new generation of people that want to race.”