NASCAR’s decision to open its calendar with a stadium race in Southern California remains divisive among fans.
To start the NASCAR Cup Series season anywhere other than Daytona International Speedway at any time before the second week in February has been seen by some as a slap in the face to NASCAR’s well-established tradition. Instead, in recent years, the series has kicked off the year with an exhibition event at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the Busch Light Clash.
But NASCAR’s first season-opening tradition wasn’t the Daytona 500 at all.
Many of the early years of NASCAR saw each season begin in the late fall of the year before – Wendell Scott’s historic victory in December 1963 actually earned him points toward the ‘64 crown – but for 18 years, between 1963 and 1981, NASCAR kicked off each calendar year at Southern California’s Riverside International Raceway.
Built in 1957 in Riverside County, Calif., two-ish-hours’ drive from Los Angeles, Riverside was constructed during a golden era in Southern California motorsports: the post-World War II sports car racing boom, when veterans came back from Europe with a taste for the light, nimble roadsters produced by MG, Alfa Romeo and the like, and wanted to race.
With its long straights, fast corners and treacherous braking zone into the turn 9 hairpin – especially on mid-century tires and brakes – Riverside developed a reputation. First: for danger, as California racer John Lawrence passed away from a brain injury in its inaugural event, becoming the first of 21 people to lose their lives in the Moreno Valley dust, a list that includes Cup champion Fred Lorenzen and sports car legend Ken Miles.
Its second was as a star maker. Carroll Shelby, before winning Le Mans as a driver or ever lending his name to car, took the checkered flag in the first sports car Grand Prix at the track, a title he narrowly wrested away from a local kid driving a car called the “Arciero Special,” a half-Ferrari, half-Maserati hot rod that Shelby and Miles had both refused to drive.
That kid’s name? Dan Gurney.
Gurney was one of this country’s greatest contributions to the world of motor racing. By 1967, he’d be the first driver to win in sports cars, Formula 1, NASCAR and Indy cars. The iconic bubble in the roof of the Ford GT40? To clear the 6 ft. 4 inch. Gurney’s helmet. It took aerospace engineers years to figure out how the “Gurney flap”…
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