NASCAR’s decision to open its calendar with a stadium race in Southern California remains divisive among fans.
Kicking off the NASCAR Cup Series season anywhere other than Daytona International Speedway anytime before the second week of February was perceived by some as a slap in the face to NASCAR’s well-established tradition. Instead, in recent years, the series kicked off the year with an exhibition at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the Busch Light Clash.
But NASCAR’s first season opener wasn’t the Daytona 500 at all.
In most of NASCAR’s early years, both seasons began in the last fall of last year (Wendell Scott’s historic victory in December 1963 earned him trouble for the 1964 crown); however, for 18 years, between 1963 and 1981, NASCAR started both seasons. and both calendar years at Riverside International Raceway in Southern California.
Built in 1957 in Riverside County, Calif., two-ish-hours’ drive from Los Angeles, Riverside was constructed during a golden era in Southern California motorsports: the post-World War II sports car racing boom, when veterans came back from Europe with a taste for the light, nimble roadsters produced by MG, Alfa Romeo and the like, and wanted to race.
With its long straightaways, fast corners, and dangerous braking zone at turn nine, especially with mid-century tires and brakes, Riverside has developed a reputation. First: Out of peril, California driver John Lawrence died of a brain injury at his inauguration. event, becoming the first of 21 others to lose their lives in the dust of Moreno Valley, a list that includes Cup champion Joe Weatherly and sports car legend Ken. Miles.
Its second was as a star maker. Carroll Shelby, before winning Le Mans as a driver or ever lending his name to car, took the checkered flag in the first sports car Grand Prix at the track, a title he narrowly wrested away from a local kid driving a car called the “Arciero Special,” a half-Ferrari, half-Maserati hot rod that Shelby and Miles had both refused to drive.
This child’s? Dan Gurney.
Gurney is one of this country’s greatest contributions to the world of motorsport. In 1967, he would be the first driver to win in sports cars, Formula 1, NASCAR and Indy. The iconic bubble on the roof of the Ford GTfour0?the 6 feet four inches. It took aerospace engineers years to figure out how the “Gurney Flap” spoiler was used on the trailing edge of a wing with higher downforce — years that Gurney used to win races. He co-created CART and won the first Cannonball Run. He invented the champagne spray on F1 podiums.
And Riverside your playground. When Gurney died (in 2018), the car’s legendary owner, Glen Wood, said: “Once we got it going, it was almost certain that we would win the race if nothing happened to the car. ” Between 1963 and 1969, every time he saw the checkered flag at Riverside, he was the first driver to see it: five wins in eight starts, all at Riverside and all in January.
While the race was officially sponsored through Motor Trend magazine, after a few years another competition began colloquially calling it the Dan Gurney 500.
To put it frankly, behind the wheel of a stock car, no driver could beat Gurney at Riverside. The only thing that could beat Gurney was Riverside itself.
Today, NASCAR road races span a distance of about 220 miles, particularly shorter than the sprint races that make up the vast majority of the calendar. The ones in Riverside. . . they weren’t. The Motor Trend 500 completed 186 full laps on a 2. 7-mile track, totaling more than 500 miles. On a road circuit. In the mid-1960s, the cars were inventoried.
Race times stretched to more than 4 hours, and mechanical problems doomed many cars and drivers to not be able to handle the prolonged cycles of braking, gear changes, and sudden accelerations. But Gurney and his colleagues AJ Foyt, Parnelli Jones and Mark Donohue were used to racing at Le Mans.
Still, Gurney is head and shoulders above the rest.
After driving a Ford Holman-Moody to his first win in 1963 (only his third start as a motorist, but a statistic like that almost goes without saying), the Blue Oval introduced Gurney’s path to Wood Brothers Racing in 1964. Gurney entered 3 races for the Woods in 1964. I won Riverside, of course, and finished the Daytona 500 in a respectable 14th place. But after failing to finish the summer race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Gurney has never finished a lap in a Cup car anywhere else. than Riverside.
From 1965 to 1970, Gurney competed in only one Cup race a year: the Riverside 500 in January. He won it three more times before, although it was all defeated in 1970, not by a mechanical problem, but through Foyt.
He left NASCAR racing with five wins, eight best fives and ten best 10s in 15 starts.
Gurney came out of retirement from NASCAR a decade later, at the request of then-Trac president Les Richter, to return to his old playground, driving a No. Gurney suffered a transmission failure on lap 79 of the race. , when he was third.
For 1982, NASCAR moved its crown jewel, the Daytona 500, to the season-opening slot, with the Riverside 500 replacing the closed Ontario Motor Speedway (a 2. 5-mile oval quad clone of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the Inland Empire). worthy of the name). of yours only yesterday). But moving a race from January to November would leave California with a Cup race for a full year, between the 400 miles in June 1981 and the same occasion in 1982.
Then a solution was found: To maintain the six-month cycle, Riverside would host three trouble-paying Cup events in 1981, adding the season opener and finale. Both races were won by Bobthrough Allison, with Darrell Waltrip taking the checkered flag in June. No venue would exceed two themed races a year until the 2020 season was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Riverside remained home to Golden State’s first series auto races until 1988, Bill Elliott’s first auto win in 1983, and Tim Richmond’s last four years later, until the same forces that doomed Ontario (and would doom the Auto Club Speedway) sealed its fate: the skyrocketing price of Southern California real estate.
The track was sold to Fritz Duda, a former broadcaster and real estate developer for the MNR, in 1971. In the late 1980s, the Moreno Valley’s immediate economic expansion created an offer that Duda could not refuse. Rusty Wallace won the Cup final on the track, they demolished it and built a grocery mall on the property.
But not all is lost. In 1989, NASCAR moved north and adopted Sonoma Raceway as its new West Coast home. The elegant and dangerous direction of the road runs through the green hills of Wine Country, at least during the rainy season.
But NASCAR visits in June, when the symbol of the original cars sliding through the dust reminds us of all the January trips to Riverside.
Jack Swansey mostly covers single-seater racing for Frontstretch and co-hosts the Pit Straight podcast, but you can also see him writing about NASCAR, sports cars, and anything with 4 wheels and an engine. Originally from North Carolina and now living in Los Angeles, he joined as editor of the Sunday paper in mid-2022 and is an avid collector (some would say collector) of diecast cars.
Jack, Fred Lorenzen did not get killed at Riverside, I think you meant Joe Weatherly.