Riverside Remembered

The track that epitomized racing in Southern California

Don Fuller / autoMedia.com

To those who raced there and watched there, and today drive by there on the way for a weekend in Palm Springs, Riverside Raceway is fondly remembered. Not because it was a nice place to go or be. It may have possessed greatness, but it most certainly did not offer hospitality. Carved out of a rocky, dry, hot, and mean spot of ground that at the time didn't seem any good for much of anything else but a racetrack, and is today covered with shopping malls, tract houses and fast-food joints, Riverside never gave an inch. To any racer, that was part of its undeniable appeal.

Of the Desert

Riverside International Raceway—it earned the "International" middle name the hard, honest way—was born in the late 1950s at a time when sports car racing was coming into its own but Southern California had no suitable track. The Southern California hot rod explosion had fostered drag strips all over the place. Still, there was no proper road course.

Then, as now, Southern California property was pricey. Out past Riverside was found what had once been a turkey farm. Some dedicated souls put in a lot of sweat, and soon the bulldozers and paving machines were grunting and groaning at the rocky desert. It's important to mention some of those who made it happen: Rudy Cleye, a sports car enthusiast and owner of a Los Angeles restaurant called The Blarney Castle, is credited with having the original dream. John Edgar, a major-league sports car racing team owner, handled the finance side for construction and completion through his John Edgar Enterprises. That memorable track layout was the work of architect William L. Duquette; Donald V. Kendall was the structural engineer and the general contractor was James E. Peterson. E. Forbes "Robbie" Robinson, a racer of note, was the first general manager, and Steve Mason took care of publicity. The original track length was 3.275 miles, although some early plans were for five miles.

The record shows the first race as having taken place on September 21, 1957, after a ribbon-cutting ceremony done by then-California Lieutenant Governor Butch Powers and Robbie Robinson. The first SCCA-sanctioned National race was the weekend of November 16-17. The number and names of big-time drivers, teams and cars that raced there over the years is too monumental to list here. Just figure, at least everybody who was anybody raced at Riverside—and a lot more than that.

Eating Dust

It was THE racetrack in Southern California. Before and after Ontario. And decades before Long Beach. Riverside was dirty, dusty, windy, stinking hot in the summer, sometimes biting cold in the winter. When you went there, you and everything you brought home had to be cleaned up. The Riverside dust ground its way into every crevice of your toolbox, let alone the shift linkage of the racecar. The wind blew your girlfriend's hair into a gritty rat's nest. Photographers swore every shot at Riverside was backlit, and if that dust wasn't any good for a shift linkage, how do you think it was for a Nikon? And yet, in those glory years of the Sixties and into the Seventies, people came by the tens of thousands. There's a photograph someplace, taken from a blimp or helicopter, which shows a Can-Am race day in the Sixties and the infield was flat wall-to-wall carpeted with cars and people.

But no matter the conditions that sometimes seemed to be out of a movie about the French Foreign Legion, to a racer, Riverside was a place you had to master. It rewarded those who were both brave and technically proficient. It's no wonder that Dan Gurney, Mario Andretti, Mark Donohue, Parnelli Jones, George Follmer, Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme were good there.

Suffered No Fools

It also suffered no fools, didn't tolerate the timid. If you weren't prepared to hold the gas down, Riverside did not let you off the hook. If your throttle foot wavered as you came screaming past the pits, around Turn One and then headed up to Turn Two, you were out of luck, because Turn Two asked you to make a commitment. If you got sloppy on the entrance to Turn Six, it would cost you. Using the short course or the long one, if you didn't concentrate on making a strong, clean exit off Turn Seven A or Turn Eight, the guy who did would blow by before you got to the bridge over the back straight. Come ripping under that bridge and there was that boilerplate wall surrounding Turn Nine, as high as a tall man and backed up with packed desert dirt.

Yet, Riverside had a certain rhythm to it. Unlike the herky-jerky topless concrete tunnels that make up current street courses, all full of chicanes, and designed so the folks who pay for the seats can see as much as possible, Riverside was a classic among road courses, right up there with Elkhart Lake, Watkins Glen and early Laguna Seca. It had a certain rhythm to it, and the driver who found and worked with that rhythm, got in step with it, didn't fight it but flowed with it, could run up at the front—if he held the gas down.

Minus Eight

The track also changed over the years. Originally, the long back straight sent you sailing headlong into a fairly tight Turn Nine that was intended to be one end of an oval. Later, Turn Nine was opened up considerably, and you got there by first taking a flat-out kink in the back straight. The planned oval never amounted to much. Turn Seven A, that chopped off part of the back straight and eliminated Turn Eight, was added by the California Sports Car Club and gave the track its popular, short-course configuration. The short straight from Turn Six to Turn Eight, that eliminated the entire Turn Seven area, was put in to accommodate the NASCAR crowd.

Riverside was a focal point of some great racing lore. Read more about some legends and epic battles in Riverside Raceway: The Hot Tarmac.