IRWINDALE SPEEDWAY CLOSES

Irwindale Speedway, home to NASCAR, ASA, and USAC races, the place that came to be known as “The House of Drift”, and the facility that Hall of Fame racing driver and TV commentator Darrell Waltrip said had “the best short track racing I’ve ever seen”  has (like so many other great Southern California motorsports facilities before it) closed to make way for an industrial office complex. In this case, it’ll be vexingly named “500 Speedway Drive”—the street address of the racetrack since its inception.  

A few years before Irwindale Speedway launched in March of 1999, one of LACar’s regular contributors, motorsports historian Harold Osmer wrote a popular book series that was quite appropriately named Where They Raced. It was a reckoning of all of the race tracks that were located in Southern California from 1900-2020.  For the record, there were an amazing 179 of them built over that time span, and now, with Irwindale closing, it leaves only 14 still in operation as of the date this article was written.

PERSONAL: Late in 1997, I was the second employee hired at Irwindale Speedway (Ray Wilkings, the track’s General Manager was the first). Ray (who had managed Saugus Speedway for many years prior) and I shared a small office trailer on the vast piece of land that would become the Speedway. We had a two-telephone, two-line telephone system, one computer, and a wall-size construction blueprint of the track, that showed the surrounding grandstands, offices, and parking areas, and a lot of enthusiasm.

In the end I worked at Irwindale Speedway as a public relations manager under all three regimes that operated the place, with forays into the book-selling business (Autobooks-Aerobooks in Burbank) and doing corporate PR (for Gale Banks who manufactured high performance equipment for diesel trucks). But the track called me back in 2010.

In 2011, I was back working the PR side at the track when the founding company filed for bankruptcy on February 13, 2012. 

Shaking off that craziness, I ended up working for both of the two final corporate entities which operated the track (sequentially, not at the same time).  I retired, with full honors and a cheap plaque in 2018.** 

Needless to say, it’s hard for me to see it go.

Over the years, Irwindale Speedway and Dragstrip have both been places where not only great racing has happened but where young race driving talent was nurtured and where drivers of all ages could go to “exercise” their street cars on a National Hot Rod Association-sanctioned 1/8-mile dragstrip in safety and in front of throngs of admiring fans.

LA County Fire, the Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, and a number of other law enforcement and safety agencies from across the county and well beyond, made good use of the facility, staging everything from graduation ceremonies to large-scale tactical training exercises, including using the vast parking lot as a place for driver training for everything from motorcycles to fire department tiller rigs. Even without any ticket buying “butts in the seats” Irwindale was always working.

Over the years a large number of automotive and motorcycle manufactures have used the Speedway to introduce new vehicles to the world’s press.  Along the way Irwindale became known in some circles as “The House of Drift”—an accolade that sprang from it’s almost perfect setup for staging championship professional drift events that annually attracted full-house, sellout, turn-away crowds.  

The track also featured Kart racing events, bicycle criterions, special car shows, like the famous “MoonEyes Holiday Party”, a multi-discipline edition of the X-Games, “Fabulous Fords Forever” and “Nitrofest”-style shows with top fuel dragsters.  There also was some (secret) government testing (shhhhh!), and an annual drive-through Christmas holiday lights drive-through event that traversed both tracks at the Speedway.  

You need a place for your 225-member high school marching band from Basalt, Minnesota to practice their complicated field routines a few days before the Rose Parade and football game?  No problem, come on out to Irwindale and march around to your hearts content!

In addition, the track featured annual Automotive Literature Fairs, Vintage Car round-ups and race car tech inspections, an edition of the 2013 “X-Games”, and even (one time only) a Circus-like sideshow fun zone that took over the entire North parking lot with dizzy/whirling rides, deep-fried candy bars and tacos, and featured clowns replete with seltzer bottles and gigantic snakes (which one could actually pet) on display.

Many high-performance automobile, motorcycle, and other consumer products (including shampoo, multi-vitamins, antacids, furniture, air filters, tires, engine upgrades, and even sub sandwiches) have been seen in commercials filmed at the Speedway.   

Because of its proximity to Hollywood, conveniently located within the “TMZ” (thirty-mile zone) Irwindale has also been used extensively by production companies in many shoots that have included feature films, TV dramas, and music videos.  Lucas Oil originated their weekly MAV-TV “One and Done” Drag Racing show from Irwindale for two seasons.

In the end, it was commerce that doomed the track—an all-too common end for motorsports facilities in Southern California.  No one needed the land until progress and commerce caught up with it.  The Speedway was built on an out-of-the-way sand and gravel pit operation that had helped to build Los Angeles which got mined-out and was subsequently filled back up with a lot of the debris produced by the building of the LA subway system. 

I was about to recite the list of the lost tracks for you here … but I think I don’t need to right now.  Irwindale Speedway both lifted and broke my heart.  I enjoyed (almost) every minute of working there.  <em><b>Thanks everyone!  - DS</b>

*including providing parking spaces for hundreds of City of Hope staff members during a fourteen-month period when the highly-regarded medical facility was making major site improvements to its nearby national headquarters campus in Duarte, California.

** I would note here that the plaque is not dated, it’s my belief that it was made up early-on and kept in a lower desk drawer for instantaneous, on-the-spot use at a moment’s notice.</em>