Riverside Raceway: The Hot Tarmac

The Last Laps
In the heyday of IMSA, for a six-hour race, Foyt and Andretti were once paired in a Porsche 935. It probably wasn't the best 935 in the field, but watching each of them work that thing through traffic, watching the relentless precision of their line selection, watching the consummate professionalism of their driving workmanship, was a textbook study in how this business should be conducted.


The races at Riverside were like that. Historical racing weekends. Vivid mental snapshots that, somehow, have not yet faded to sepia and hopefully never will.


It seemed that, in the last years, there were about a million Last-Lap-of-Riverside events. Even after the whole area up around Turn Eight was plowed into a prefab shopping mall, the racing went on. Even after Turn Seven A was lost, somebody put down some new asphalt that kind of wound around from Turn Seven and made its way down to Turn Nine, and the racing went on. Give it credit, the track went down fighting. But the effect of California property values is an inevitable force.


Riverside is no longer there. But in a box I have chunks of asphalt I dug off with a hammer and chisel from the apex of Turn Two and the apex of Turn Nine. It was not easy digging.