Staff Writer 

 Dale McConnell said her father’s 1962 Chevy Corvette catches the eye of racecar drivers, and it has nothing to do with the shiny red paint, chrome bumpers or whitewall tires.

“They come over and I can hear them whispering, ‘I think that’s J.B.’s car,’” she said. “Then they see the [Beech Ridge Raceway] plaque on the trunk and they say, ‘See, I told you it was J.B.’s car.’”

Dale McConnell said her father Jim “J.B.” McConnell bought the car 13 years after he built what is now the Beech Ridge Motor Speedway on Beech Ridge Road in Scarborough and took the fuel-injected automobile on several 24-hour rallies with racetrack employee, “Doc” Robert Christopher, as his navigator.

“He used to park along a curve in the track in that car during the races,” she said. “He would sit in it and he had a little chrome fire extinguisher because he was one of the safety guys and he needed it. The drivers knew that car.”

Nearly 60 years after building the racetrack and introducing the state to the racing pastime, Jim McConnell, 96, died last month after being ill for several weeks. Dale McConnell said her father was “definitely a proprietor,” having bought parcels of land for timber and managed a lumber mill before building the raceway. 

“He was a good man to work for,” said Scarborough resident and Jim McConnell’s former employee Warren Delaware. “If you were swapping or trading with him you had to watch yourself, but he wasn’t hard to please when you worked for him.”

Delaware, who also visited with him at the Scarborough Gun Club, said Jim McConnell was intrigued by the racing industry long before establishing Beech Ridge Speedway. Dale McConnell said he grew up attending racing events at tracks in Massachusetts with an uncle.

“He always talked about racing, and I asked him why there wasn’t a track in Maine,” Delaware said. “He said he wondered about that too.”

Current Beech Ridge Motor Speedway owner Andy Cusack – his family purchased the racetrack in 1981 – said his father, a racecar driver, met Jim McConnell the first day it opened in 1949 and continued to race there for nearly 30 years. Back in those days, Dale McConnell said her father traveled to fairgrounds throughout New England to meet drivers and convince them to race at the new facility. 

“He’d have to pay them to spin out or something for the crowd, too,” she said with a laugh.

Cusack said the original racetrack was dirt, later upgraded to a clay-like mixture and eventually paved by his family in 1986. Dale McConnell said it was a family tradition to stock the concession stands and watch her father rake the dirt track in the early morning hours. 

“They mixed oil in with the dirt so it would stick to your shoes,” she said. 

Cusack said a small ceremony will take place at the racetrack this summer, per Jim McConnell’s final requests. 

“Jim never really left Beech Ridge,” Cusack said. “It was his baby. He would always come back on a race night and it was like he owned the place. And, in my mind, he still did.”

Jim McConnell’s devotion to racing didn’t stop at the Beech Ridge Raceway, either, as both Cusack said he helped other racetracks throughout the state, including the Oxford Plains Speedway in Oxford “get off to a good start.” 

“He was really about anything that promoted racing in Maine,” Dale McConnell said.

He was indoctrinated to the Maine Motorsports hall of fame in 2004, an event Dale McConnell said made her realize just how important her father had become to some of the drivers at Beech Ridge Raceway.

“When people think of racecar drivers they get a certain image,” she said. “But those guys that spoke about Dad said they owed it all to him. It really was like a family.”

Dale McConnell said her father also realized he would most likely not be able to attend a ceremony inducting him into the New England Racing Hall of Fame so he instructed his grandson to accept the honor later this month.