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Weedsport, NY (Sept. 12, 2024) – The Northeast Dirt Modified Hall of Fame joins the racing community at large in mourning the death and celebrating the life of popular North Country racer Guy “Shorty” Robinson who passed away on September 12. He was 85.
Robinson, from Brownville, NY, was inducted into the Northeast Dirt Modified Hall of Fame in 1993.
Getting his start as an on-the-spot replacement for a no-show driver at Watertown Speedway in 1964, Shorty showed he had the right stuff, qualifying his first time out. Car owners began to take notice: his big break came in ’65, when Oswego’s John Barker Sr. tapped Robinson to drive his flathead-powered No. 122. The pair clicked, putting the effort into the Watertown winner’s circle.
But it was in 1967 that the team truly cemented their frontrunner status. In a new car, painted metallic blue and numbered 13, Robinson became the man to beat on both sides of the St. Lawrence River. In Barker’s “Lil Honker”—so named for its extreme exhaust tubes—Shorty dominated at Watertown, took wins at Ontario’s Kingston Speedway and aced the inaugural event on the original clay at Evans Mills.
Switching rides in the 1970s, Robinson proved to be equally adept on both dirt and asphalt surfaces, often winning at Kingston or Can-Am and blacktop tracks like Evans Mills and Capital City in the same week.
Over the course of a career that spanned three decades, Guy Robinson successfully competed at Watertown, Brewerton, Can-Am, Evans Mills, Fort Covington and Utica-Rome speedways in New York, and at Kingston, Brockville, Capital City and Cornwall in Ontario, Canada. He was the Watertown Speedway champion in 1971 and 1973.
Until recently, Shorty was a welcome presence on the racing scene, still visiting friends at local race tracks and the Hall of Fame Museum almost 40 years after his retirement.
