Riverside Remembered

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.