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-California
Dreamin'-
| Drag
racing was a far different motorsport back in 1967, when construction concluded
on the original quarter-mile "Supertrack": a ground up drag strip project
funded by a hard-to-believe budget of over $1,000,000. In 1967, drag racing
was still struggling to shuck its notorious public image as weekend recreation
for ducktailed juvenile delinquents wearing the inevitable black leather
jackets and greasy dungarees. Our image crisis wasn't helped much by the
typical quarter-mile, eighth-mile, or fifth-mile dragstrip of that era.
Timing towers were usually erected in a single weekend by a volunteer crew
using plywood sheets and two-by-fours, period, then brush painted white.
"Guardrails" often consisted of stacked hay bales, old tires, chain-link
fences or nothing. Paved turn roads and pit areas, permanent restrooms
and bleachers, and uniformed strip employees were still considered luxuries,
if they were considered at all.
- Remember that NHRA had reluctantly lifted its 1957-1964 "Fuel Ban" only three years earlier, and did not yet formally recognize Funny Cars as legitimate race cars, with an eliminator category of their own; AA/Fuel Dragsters were still the undisputed Kings of the Sport. Supercharged nitro racing was booming throughout the country, but beyond the big-buck Ford and Chrysler factory team members, most "professional" drag racers still worked real jobs between events. Even in 1967 dollars, purse money was paltry: Top Fuel winner was lucky to pocket $500, gross, for winning three rounds of open competition. A first-round loser usually collected $100, or less. A $1000 first-place prize was considered big bucks. The richest NHRA purse of all, Indy's Top Fuel package, paid exactly $2000 cash. - So just imagine the surprise and skepticism that greeted the announcement of a million-dollar drag racing complex, designed with built-in provisions for sports cars, go-karts, and motorcycle road racers, to be constructed on prime farmland owned by Southern California's largest private landlord, the powerful Irvine Company, in the sleepy village of East Irvine. At the time, the semirural location seemed ideal: less than a mile away from the Golden State Freeway (I-5) and the San Diego Freeway (I-405), within driving range of both Los Angeles and San Diego, yet far enough from each city to preclude the encroachment of civilization. Or so it must have seemed to Orange County International Raceway promoters including, Bill White, a member of the Irvine family; Larry Vaughan, whose father had been foreman of the Irvine Ranch; and Mike Jones, the ambitious, innovative local boy who subleased the dragstrip portion of OCIR operations. The facility's leasing was handled for the Irvine Company by Vaughan, who also directed the Academy of Defensive Driving, a driving school used mainly by police departments, on the premises. |
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| True
to their promises, the group delivered a beautiful quarter-mile racetrack
in the summer of '67, complete with the trademark Champion Tower: a magnificent
three-story structure boasting luxurious offices on the lower level and
a plush VIP lounge on top. Both sides of the dragstrip were bordered by
neatly trimmed grass. Shade trees were planted liberally in both pit areas,
each of which was paved, striped, and illuminated. A genuine restaurant
was open to the public seven days a week, as was a well stocked retail
speed shop. Giant playground toys were installed inside a special pit area
reserved for kids. An army of suntanned usherettes assisted customers to
their seats.
- Other spectator innovations included reserved bleacher seating with permanent back supports, subterranean electrical wiring (for unobscured viewing), and the sport's first electric scoreboard, which was manually operated from a timing-announcing platform erected halfway up the Champion Tower. Track employees were attired in matching, All-American uniforms consisting of red Hang Ten shirts, white Levi's, and blue deck shoes, color-coordinated with OCIR's famous encircled-race-car logo. Coming attractions were lavishly promoted with heavy radio saturation on AM stations from Los Angeles to the Mexican border, using a catchy musical theme created and sung by The Four Preps, if memory serves correctly ("Or-ange Coun-ty In-ter-nation-al Race-waaaaaaaaayyyyy!") Local marching bands were lined up to lead prerace parades down the fire-up road. - Following a month-long delay caused by freak summer rainstorms, "the County" staged its much-anticipated Grand Opening event on Saturady, August 5. Spectator admission was $2, plus $1 for a pit pass. Featured were respective eight-car, open-qualifying fields of Top Fuel Dragsters, AA/Funny Cars and blown gas diggers, plus super Eliminator, a mixed bag of handicapped Fuel Altereds, supercharged gassers, and unblown Junior Fuelers. "Professor" Art Scholl's stunt plane was hired in for scary aerobatics. identical TF and FC purses were set at $1000 to win; $600, runner-up; $250, semifinalists; $125 first-round losers. However, these generous payouts were subject to a controversial new "Four-point / 20-percent Rule" calling for a hefty 20-percent purse reductions to be levied against any team not (1) officially pre-entered; (2) uniformed in white pants and matching shirts; (3) making full passes following red-light starts; (4) carrying a complete body or legible number plate. Moreover, all contestants were required to pay normal admission, pit pass, and vehicle entry fees. - Except for the uproar caused by the "Four/20 Rule," opening night was a success on all counts. An over flow audience of 14,200 was still swarming as late as 10 p.m. One hundred feature cars were joined by 300 little guys. All-time-low elapsed times were run by both James Warren's digger (6.89) and Doug Thorley's Corvair flopper (7.86), proving that the untested asphalt had plenty of teeth. (Since Warren-Coburn-Miller failed to back up the 6.89, OCIR's first official track record went home that night with Tom McEwen, who made three "Seven-oh" passes in the Gudell & Holland fueler.) The County was an instant sensation; already there was talk of NHRA's "inevitable" relocation of the annual Winternationals from Pomona's comparatively spartan L.A. Fairgrounds facility. OCIR's future appeared bright, indeed. What could possibly go wrong here? |
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| Sports
cars and motorcycles, which tried racing around a makeshift road course
connecting portions of OCIR's pits, return road and staging lanes, never
attracted much interest, becoming early deletions from the master plan.
The hoped-for Grand Prix and/or Indy-car competition reflected in the track's
logo design and "international" billing never materialized. That on-sight
restaurant folded early, due to weak weekday business, followed by the
evacuation of Johnny's Speed & Chrome.
An innovative underground pit-access tunnel from the spectator parking
lot repeatedly caved in, forcing its closure and leaving the strip with
an incurable "dip" just ahead of the finishline. trick roller starters,
powered by a Chevy small-block V8, in the hot car staging area fell into
disrepair.
- With little or no maintenance, the kiddies playground in the pits became the pits, degenerating into a potential safety hazard. Light bulbs that burned out in the elevated electric scoreboard were not always replaced, making the numbers difficult or impossible to decipher. Hungry squirrels attacked sections of the subterranean wiring, creating a troubleshooter's nightmare. Even the popular Four Preps' advertising jingle came under fire and was ultimately forced off the air, according to one former front-office staffer, following bitter disputes over royalty payments. Professional feature events were gradually cutback to a monthly schedule, poorly attended Sunday shows were scrubbed, and the weekly sportsman was consistantly outdrawn by Lions Drag Strip and Irwindale Raceway, both of which catered to a "little guy" contingent often turned off by OCIR management's unrelenting emphasis on professionalism. - The strip's sportsman attitudes improved significantly following the July '73 departure of whiz kid Mike Jones, but virtually everything else would suffer in his absence. The expensive dragstrip lease, already in five figures monthly, was quickly snapped up by an ever-mischievous Jim Tice, the late president of the American Hot Rod Association. His first move, naturally, was the termination of OCIR's long running NHRA sanction. Next, Tice turned the famous Champion Tower into Western headquarters for all AHRA operations, pouring salt into the wound. "We just moved right into Wally Parks' own backyard," chuckled Tice at the time, unaware of the true price to be paid for his startling little coup. - C.J. "Pappy" Hart, the succesful Santa Ana and Lions manager, was coaxed out of retirement and got the transition off to a fairly smooth start that summer, overseeing the first national event in OCIR history (AHRA Grand American West). Before the '73 season concluded, however, Hart had resigned after clashing repeatedly with AHRA executives Rick Lynch and Blaine Laux, a man best known as Jim Tice's personal pilot. Laux, a former Kansas city sportsman racer familiar with neither track management nor the tricky California marketplace, nontheless was named OCIR's third strip manager of 1973. |
| The
subsequent season, handicapped by some of the worst weekend weather in
local history, enjoyed some successful promotions, but the box office repeatedly
bled red ink. Even the well-attended variety shows starring Evel
Knievel, Bo Diddley,
and Flash Cadillac
failed to recover losses suffered by the AHRA's second annual Grand American
West, which was unfortuneatly scheduled directly opposite Ontario
Motor Speedway's inaugural Califronia Jam;
merely the biggest single-day rock concert in history, attracting 250,000
potential drag fans. Not long after, Jim Tice walked away from AHRA leases
at both OCIR and sister track Fremont Raceway,
estimating his combined California losses at roughly $1,000,000 in less
than a year. Both strip managers stayed on, however, and both tracks retained
AHRA sanctions under subsequent tenant Larry
Huff, another inexperienced race promoter,
who took over June 1, 1974.
- An active Pro Stock driver and self made millionaire, Huff told a Drag News editor that he originally assumed Jim tice's OCIR and Fremont leases purely on impulse, reacting to a heated public disagreement with NHRA officials working tje '74 Bakersfield March Meet. Accounts of the incident vary slightly, but Huff admitted to trying to enter his Soapy Sales Dodge Dart with an expired NHRA competition license. Worse, the typewritten "year of issue" had evidently been tampered with to conceal this fact. The high-ranking female official who detected this discrepency with NHRA records supposedly ripped Larry's license into several pices while lecturing him loudly, in front of gawd and everybody. Less than three months later, Larry Huff was suddenly in the dragstrip business in a big way, operating two major tracks inside NHRA's home state. - Fortuneatly, though, business was not so good for Mr. Huff. He abandoned Fremont before the end of that summer, citing irreconcilable differences with the landlord, then dropped OCIR in March '75. The move surprised most observers, coming on the heels of four winter Funny Car promotions averaging over 10,000 paid spectators each. "In eight months, even though the strip did as well as ever as it's ever done in its life, we lost like 65 thousand (dollars)," said Huff at the time. "It's just a very poor business. If we were lucky, (OCIR) could gross a million, million-one a year and break even- and that's bad business!" - Incredibly, Supertrack subsequently sat idle most weekends while Irvine Company liaison Larry Vaughan, last of the plant's founding fathers, interviewed wary potential leasees. The only man willing and able to assume OCIR's league-leading over head tab turned out to be Bill Doner, whose International Raceway Parks organization had previously gobbled up unwanted leases in Seattle, Portland, Fremont, and elsewhere. IRP also controlled OCIR's only surviving competitor, Irwindale Raceway, and Irwindale manager Steve Evans consequently assumed day-to-day direction of IRP's three California holdings. OCIR's sanctioning returned to NHRA, and IRP's exclusive lock on the SoCal market helped return Supertrack to steady profitablility. But the facility was also headed for its most controversial five seasons ever. |
-| Increasingly
wilder "Fox Hunt" promotions, well-amplified heavy metel musicians minimal
crowd control, jet dragster competition past midnight, and especially a
few well-publicized acts of violence generated unprecedented protest from
OCIR's ultrconcervative, ever-encroaching neighbors in Orange County. Moreover,
it became common knowledge throughout the west that OCIR's evening features
were no place to take the wife and kids. Bracket racers forced to deal
with drunks in the pits began arming themselves for Fox Hunt-style meets,
or simply staying home. The late-seventies killing of an innocent young
racing fan inspired particularliy nasty editorials in local newspapers,
and is sometimes blamed today for eliminating whatever OCIR support that
may still have existed within the Irvine Company.
- Bill Doner would argue convincingly that OCIR's super-value acreage has always been doomed to eventual redevelopement into a giant industrial complex, per the landlord's master plan for the Irvine area which carries the family name. (The company currently owns about 68,000 acres of property inside Orange County. This land was recently appraised by the county assessor at more than three billion dollars.) What nobody could've predicted, back in 1967, is the area's incredible transformation from farmland to conjested suburbs inside of a decade. and we all know what happens, later if not sooner, once a rural dragstrip finds itself surrounded by Suburbia. (It should also be noted that this noisy facility was constructed literally within earshot of a major retirement community, Leisure World of El Toro, which already existed in 1967.) - The best evidence of this "inevitable developement" theory may be OCIR's much-improved image since 1980, when Bill Doner, claiming financial losses, closed up shop and moved to Mexico. Riding into East Irvine like the proverbial white knight came Charlie Allen, the ex-Funny Car star whose racing nickname used to be "All-American Boy." Despite his track management inexperience, Supertrack's last three-plus seasons turned out to be the smoothest since Mike Jones' era, and also some of the most profitable ever, according to Allen. Indeed, hardcore drag racing fans returned in droves during the Eighties, often accompanied by wives and kids, for monthly Funny Car features. Allen's crew, headed by Lynn Rose and veteran SoCal field manager Kenny Green, successfully restored much of the past glory, while dramatically slashing neighborhood complaints. Still, midway through '82, Irvine Company officials leaked their intentions not to renew the strip's year-to-year lease. - Thousands of signed petitions and Charlie Allen's impressive turnaround probably helped convince the landlord to renew his lease, at the last moment, for 12 months only. What followed was probably the most successful single OCIR season in a decade (including NHRA's best-attended World Finals ever, and back-to-back 32-Funny car shows on consecutive Saturday evenings.) But this time, the Irvine Company could not be budged; no amount of lobbying would get Charlie Allen's lease renewed. For the record, OCIR went out of business in the wee hours of October 30, 1983. |
| Twelve
months later, Southern California drag racers are struggling to regroup.
Troubled old dragstrips in Riverside
and Palmdale
are back in business, supported exclusively by diehard ET Bracket bombers
and Pro gas enthusiasts. Carlsbad Raceway
runs little guys every week, and is experimenting with monthly Funny Car
specials, as well. Bakersfield's
Fuel & Gas Championships was outstanding this year, and we can't complain
about hosting two NHRA national events at Pomona.
So we're getting by here in the sport's birthplace, but drag racing sure
hasn't been the same without those long Saturday evenings in the finish-line
grandstands at Orange County International Raceway.
- All that's left of that bleacher section today is its block supporting wall. What's left of Supertrack is even less than what shows in these numbing Alan Earman photographs, which were snapped back in May. What doesn't show is the giant bridge of concrete sneaking up behind OCIR's site, where the bleach boxes used to be. We've been told that this will becom a transition ramp from Interstate 5, speeding eager freeway commuters directly into the shops and offices that this precious soil was meant to support. - Millions and millions of dollars will undoubtedly change hands here in the future, and nobody will have to pick beer cans out of the streets on Sunday mornings any more, but one thing's for certain: the county of Orange's best years are all in the past. Just ask any drag racing enthusiast. after all, it was here that commercial drag racing was born in June 1950 at the Orange County Airport, still situated just a few miles up the San Diego Freeway from the spot where Orange County International Raceway expired last October. In between came 33 seasons of year-round, uninterrupted automotive entertainment simply not available outside Southern California. God, it was great while it lasted! |
| California Dreamin'----- | |
-----Biography: OCIR |
