Despite plans for major changes at the New Hampshire International Speedway, the track's new owner may be forced to comply with several legal agreements the current owners made with neighbors nearly 20 years ago.

O. Bruton Smith announced at a press conference Nov. 2 that the track's owner, Bob Bahre, had accepted his $340 million bid to buy New Hampshire International Speedway. Smith said he would name a track manager who would re-evaluate the commitments made by Bahre, which include no night racing and no beer sales in the stands.

"We will live with whatever he does," Smith said. "I'm sure it'll be a very friendly, neighborly situation we're in."

But several residents in Canterbury said some of the track's policies are more than verbal commitments to neighbors. They are part of a legal settlement reached with Bahre in 1989 before the track was built.

The agreement prohibits musical concerts, night racing, tractor pulls, drag racing, mud runs and demolition derbies, for as long as the track is used as a racetrack. The agreement was attached to the project's site plan approval and the deed, and it includes several other requirements to help alleviate noise and traffic congestion that accompany race weekends.

"There is a legal agreement that we believe is binding on this company that has purchased the speedway from the Bahres," said Arnie Alpert of Canterbury, who took the track and the Loudon Planning Board to court to get the commitments in writing.

Alpert said many of the track's neighbors had no idea at the time that the Loudon Planning Board was reviewing the proposal and were shocked to learn the track had been sold to Bahre, who planned to build a sports facility with the largest seating capacity in New England. Eight residents - Alpert, his partner, Judy Elliott, Jim and Sue Snyder, Steve Booth, Laurie Webster-Booth, Galen Beale and Erwin Lange - formed a group called Concerned Racetrack Neighbors and challenged the planning board's approval of the project.

In the end, both sides entered into an amicable agreement, longtime planning board member Bob Ordway said.

"He must have looked to everybody like a real big-time operator, which I guess he was," Ordway said. "But Bob, starting right then, was willing to cooperate and give and take and, as you can see from the outcome of this situation, he pretty much agreed to what the townspeople demanded."

Alpert said one of the group's concerns at the outset was whether the agreement would carry over to Bahre's successors when he eventually sold the track. The final paragraph of the stipulation, filed in Merrimack County Superior Court, seems to ensure that.

"This agreement shall be binding on New Hampshire Speedway, Inc. and its successors so long as the land is used as a racetrack," the agreement says. It also specifies that the first three paragraphs of the agreement, prohibiting concerts, drag racing, mud runs, demolition derbies, tractor pulls and night racing, "be recorded in the Merrimack County Registry of Deeds to apply so long as the track is used as a racetrack."

Ordway said the planning board met with Bahre several times, and it seemed many of the agreement's covenants were rules that Bahre would have implemented himself.

The agreement limits the amount of alcohol patrons may bring into the track, and limits beer sales inside the track to no more than two 12-ounce beers per person. It requires the owners to make a reasonable effort to notify patrons about rules prohibiting fireworks and building fires without a permit.

It also requires them to coordinate and pay for traffic control personnel at several intersections in town during racing events at which they expect more than 15,000 people. And it requires them to pay for sound barriers at each end of the track and to limit the number of days that cars without mufflers may race.

When neighbors of the track learned it had been sold to Bahre, who planned to expand it, Alpert said it aroused fears that the "mayhem" that occurred near the track would only get worse. Previously known as Bryar Motorsports Park, the track hosted motorcycle races every summer and attracted thousands of people who camped out in the woods around it. One year, the National Guard was called in to control a riot that had broken out among bikers.

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