The roar of engines, squealing of tires and cheers from race fans won’t be heard at Unity Raceway this season.

Track owner Ralph Nason announced Tuesday that racing at the 1/3-mile oval has been suspended for the season.

The rising cost of fuel was cited as the central problem.

“[The cost of fuel] is the main issue,” said Nason. “That is what’s killing everything.”

Because the cost of fuel is so high and affects practically everything in everyday life, hobbies are generally the first to experience cuts to save money.

“Let’s say you have a race car and a pickup and it’s 40 miles to the track,” said Nason, who has owned the track since 1980. “By the end of the second week, you’ve spent $200 [on gas alone].”

Nason added that if a driver takes a week off to save money, fans notice.

“The spectators look and say, ‘Where’s the cars?’ Then the fans don’t come back,” said Nason.

Concession stand workers, track officials, lawn mowers and even drivers all need to be paid.

“It takes a lot of time and effort [to run a race track],” said Nason. “And no one wanted to do it.”

Nason, a driver himself, said it would cost $2,500 to race his car on a given weekend. Racing fuel costs $7-$8 a gallon, he said.

As expected, not many race drivers are happy about the decision.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said defending Super Street champion Brad Bellows. “It would’ve been nice to have more of a warning than five weeks before the car show.”

Bellows, who lives only 10 minutes from the track in China village, intended to race a full season at Unity Raceway, but now he’s in limbo.

Bellows said that at the end of last season, Nason made certain rules changes to the Super Street division that would make cars in that class unique to Unity.

“Now I have a brand-new body that’s completely useless,” said Bellows.

The new “dirt-outlaw body” is all aluminum with a fiberglass roof. It cost Bellows $2,000. The body won’t be allowed to race at any other track in Maine.

Bellows said that he wasn’t the only driver who purchased a new body.

“There’s a lot of [upset] people,” added Bellows.

Another driver who is upset is Kris Huff of Orrington, who ran six races in the Super Street division last year and intended to race more this year.

“I called my engine guy and told him to hold off on building the car,” said Huff. “I was going to put $5,000-$6,000 into a car so I could race there.”

Huff’s father-in-law, Doug Sinclair of Hermon, said he spent $20,000 on a new car to race at Unity.

“Now I have to spend another $4,000 to change the car to race at [Speedway 95 in Hermon],” said Sinclair. “I can’t afford to let the car sit all year either.”

“What bothers me,” Sinclair continued, “is that they talked to the drivers a week ago and they didn’t say anything [about possibly closing the track].”

Nason hopes the closing will only be temporary.

“We’re going to leave it shut down for this year and really see what’s going on [in the economy] so we can get everything set up so we can get 2009 going in the right direction,” said Nason. “[But] it might even take two years.”

Nason said that leasing the track is an option, but there are no serious offers at the moment. Selling the track could also happen, but that isn’t likely.

That leaves the state with five tracks: Speedway 95, Spud Speedway in Caribou, Oxford Plains Speedway in Oxford, Wiscasset Raceway and Beech Ridge Motor Speedway in Scarborough.