Riverside Raceway: The Hot Tarmac

The stories Riverside had. Was it one of the local motels where the rental car of "Stroker Ace" went into the swimming pool? If you left the track and took Highway 60 east toward Palm Springs instead of west back to Los Angeles, after just a few miles the road wound through a California canyon with a series of hellacious up-and-down curves. More than one racecar went through a late Saturday-night test run through that canyon. But probably the primary Saturday night activity took place in the Presidential piano bar, off the lobby of the Mission Inn in downtown Riverside where, as one old-timer put it, the racing crowd "hung out and earned hangovers."

Can-Am to IROC
The Last Great Can-Am Race, 1973, with Donohue in the Porsche 917-30, was held at Riverside. Watching from the hill over Turn Seven you saw him come around on the first lap with nearly the length of the straight from Turn Six to Seven between the Sunoco monster and the rest of the field. That same weekend was also the scene of the very first IROC races, identical Porsches, when IROC really meant International: Donohue, Follmer, Peter Revson, Emerson Fittipaldi, Hulme, Bobby Allison, Richard Petty, David Pearson, A.J. Foyt, Bobby Unser, Gordon Johncock, Roger McClusky. The first time they came flying through the esses and up to Turn Six was breathtaking ... the world had never seen anything like it.


The Last Great TransAm Race was held there, in 1970, when Parnelli heaved and hammered a banged up Mustang through a darkening afternoon to catch and then get past Follmer, and in the process beat a field that included Gurney, Swede Savage, Donohue, Revson, David Hobbs, Sam Posey, Milt Minter, Vic Elford, Tony Adamowicz, Ronnie Bucknum and a lot more. Can you imagine seeing a field like that today? Unless you were there, you can't believe the way Parnelli willed that torn up Mustang to the lead.

Indy to F1
In 1974 there was a Formula 5000 race with Andretti, Al Unser, Brian Redman, James Hunt, John Morton, Jerry Grant, Vern Schuppan and Lella Lombardi (remember her?). Added to the field was Bobby Unser, who brought along the Indy Eagle with its turbo Offy; strangely, the rules let it in with the F5000 cars. He put that thing on the pole, too. The rules on boost then were pretty much that you could keep whatever you could get and?man, oh, man?did it get with it down the back straight?until it broke and Mario won. Looking back, that field had three Indy 500 winners and two Formula 1 World Champions. That was the same weekend of the second year of IROC, when it was switched to Camaros Donohue had built in the Penske shops in Pennsylvania.


In the late Sixties, the Indy cars started coming for the Rex Mays 300. Standing on the bluff on the inside of the esses for one of those races, up high, first lap, was Gurney in his Eagle with Andretti right up his exhaust. Everybody else was snarling and howling behind them, and up high on that bluff you could look right down into the cars, Gurney and Andretti were driving those things like the devil's Dobermans were at their heels. That mental picture defined "racecar driver."