Lords of Dirt, a homegrown flat-track motorcycle race now in its third year, returns to Missoula’s Western Montana Fair rodeo arena this Sunday, Aug. 13. The race is a modern twist on moto history, a revival of the original discipline of racing — lapping a dirt oval track — enhanced with freestyle jumps and tricks during intermission, a punk band and a broad variety of race categories beyond track riders. Practice riding begins at 11 a.m. with heat races after. That’s free to watch. The main event starts at 6 p.m., with grandstands opening to ticketed fans at 5 p.m.

Lords of Dirt took over motorsports night, the final night of the fair, from demolition derby. The first Lords of Dirt in 2021 set a new record for motorsports night attendance: nearly 2,000 spectators. In 2022, just over 2,000 people packed the grandstands — another record. Riders competed in categories including kids, pull-start engine, vintage, women’s, amateur, pro, hooligan (stripped-down street bikes) and inappropriate (quirky machines wholly unfit for competition, but raced nonetheless). Heat races around midday advance top finishers to finals later in the main event.

This year, event organizer Ryan Montgomery, proprietor of Montgomery Distillery in Missoula, hopes attendance will inch closer to the venue’s 2,400-person capacity.

The gradual increase in spectators would mirror Montgomery and other race organizers’ approach to the race itself: Take the last year’s event and tweak it until it’s better. On Tuesday, Montgomery was ensconced in his office at the distillery, surrounded by a jumble of vintage bikes in various states of disassembly. The 46-year-old, a farmer and distiller by trade with a lifelong motorcycling hobby, had never organized a race before the inaugural Lords of Dirt in ‘21. Luckily a few of his friends had.

“The first year was a big kind-of crapshoot because we’d never done anything like this before, and we were doing it for the first time in front of a couple thousand people,” he said. “We were a little bit creaky and not as smooth as we’d wanted to be that first year, and there was some dead space, some dead air. And so that second year we wanted to fill that space.”

The 2022 Lords of Dirt went much more smoothly, he said, but Montgomery and his team may have overcorrected: “That manifested itself into a show that ran very, very smoothly, but also very quickly.”

The main event they hoped would last nearly two hours clocked in at just over 60 minutes. So: “This year we’re building on that again and we’re putting more into the evening show. It’s going to be more of a well-rounded show and it’s going to be longer, but it’s still going to be action-packed.”

Compared with last year, more categories’ finals races have been moved to the main event, Montgomery said. Butte’s Keith Sayers and his crew of freestyle motocross riders will once again perform backflips and other jumping tricks across the infield during intermission. But this year they’ll be accompanied with a performance by The Skurfs, a self-described “ski-surf” band who are the Rocky Mountains’ answer to SoCal surf-punks Agent Orange.

Also new this year: Lords of Dirt is part of the Grand National Hooligan Championship’s West division series. A standalone event the past two years, Lords of Dirt is now the fifth of seven GNHC West races that span from May 27’s event in Lodi, California, to the Sept. 17 season-closer in Billings. The nationwide Hooligan series is a so-called “outlaw” race series, which only means that it’s not under the umbrella of the American Motorcyclist Association.

“It’s kind of fun to be called an outlaw race,” Montgomery said, noting, “There’s nothing really outlaw about it.” But the inclusion in a larger race series means this year’s event will have a professional timing crew and transponders on each motorcycle, rather than volunteers tracking racers visually. “We’ve been lucky because there hasn’t been a super photo finish the last two years that would require us to have transponders to tell who won. But it’s a matter of time until there’s a dispute.”

Flat-track racing is the original style of American motorcycle racing. It began in the late 1940s after World War II and grew into a national phenomenon of sorts in the late ‘60s through the ‘80s. Bruce Brown’s Academy Award-nominated 1971 documentary “On Any Sunday” immortalized the style. The seminal motorcycle documentary brought flat-track racing into the living rooms of millions of Americans while paving the way for the popular rise of motocross and BMX bicycle racing. But flat track’s prominence faded in the ‘80s when road racing, previously a component of the national circuit alongside flat track, was split off into a standalone discipline, and when motocross exploded into cultural and commercial dominance in the ‘90s.

Hooligan flat-track racing is performed on street-legal bikes from 1986 or later that weigh, at minimum, 370 pounds and feature a multi-cylinder engine of at least 650-cubic-centimeters displacement. Harley-Davidson Sportster street bikes are the most common, but any bike that fits the criteria can be made into a Hooligan flat-tracker. The Harley’s prominence harks back to the brand’s dominance in professional flat-track racing, particularly with the legendary XR-750, a purpose-built, flat-track race machine. But those stripped-down race bikes were more than 75 pounds lighter than the lightest allowable Hooligan. Plus, Hooligan race bikes are built in garages, rather than in a factory team shop.

Compared with AMA racing, Hooligan racing is “rowdier, it’s more homegrown, it’s more garage-built racing,” said Mike Schroeder, general manager of Grizzly Harley-Davidson. “Hooligan racing is street riders taking to the dirt. We get this type of racing and it makes sense to us — big heavyweight bikes that we ride in the streets. Heck yeah, I want to go race that in the dirt.”

That’s how it used to be when flat track started, anyway, he said: “It used to be a thing, years and years ago, ‘run what ya brung.’ Race the bike that you rode in on and ride home on it.”

A longtime non-competitive motorcyclist, Schroeder began racing when he helped Montgomery and friends including Tyler Clark and Trent Hansen organize the first Lords of Dirt. He now competes in the GNHC West series on a revamped Sportster that he used to commute to work aboard. Grizzly, Missoula’s Harley dealership, is a sponsor of Lords of Dirt.

Schroeder said from his office at the shop Wednesday that Lords of Dirt’s inclusion in the series will greatly enhance the event for racers and spectators alike. More, and faster, racers will compete. And racers accustomed to competing elsewhere in front of small crowds of family and friends will race in Missoula in front of thousands of cheering fans.

“It’s huge, it’s super, super exciting because we knew the West deal was happening but we didn’t know Lords of Dirt was going to be part of it,” he said of the series’ formation. “Yes, we’re bringing it home to us, we’re going to give these guys a show.”