MOTOR SPORTS: Oldest drag strip marches on
Drag racing in the remote California town of Inyokern is still a desert happening...at the little track that could.
Bryce Martin, 4/2/2001
Some days it’s hard to get on track. The weekend of March 31-April 1, however, brought events back to normal for the folks at the graybeard-of-all-graybeards drag strip.
High winds bellowed and blew, rain blasted down, until, finally, the host Dust Devils Auto Club had to cancel its February drag racing calendar at the fabled track in Inyokern, Calif., after officials’ rush-through efforts failed. The next racing weekend, March 3-4, also went badly. The track and adjacent airport locale was borrowed on short notice by a film crew from Hollywood.
The Dust Devils forged the birth of one of the nation’s historic racetracks, remote and tiny, in September 1954, and did manage to launch its 2001 season opener January 20-21. The club participates in the Summit ET Racing Series and will hold a makeup points-race for that circuit June 2-3.
Situated about 100 miles east-northeast of the county seat in Bakersfield, the track sits along the Inyokern Airport and is surrounded by four mountain ranges in the Indian Wells Valley desert region. Inyokern has a population of around 1,000. Residents are mostly employed in nearby Ridgecrest or have civilian jobs at the bordering China Lake naval base.
The National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) has referred to the track as the “world’s oldest continuously operated drag strip.” A surprising 140 entries showed up for the very first races, the aftermath of which left the locals reeling when a contingent from Bakersfield ran roughshod over the Inyokern club’s inspired but outmatched bunch.
That was not about to discourage the club. After all, this was a small group that had to work, scrounge, and beg for equipment to even get started. One of the early promoters was Bernie Partridge, who later was to serve as a higher-up with the NHRA. Much of the encouragement came from area law officials who wanted an end to illegal racing on public roads. A track was located, thanks to a sweet abandonment by the U.S. Navy years before, and a move was made in 1953 to join the fledgling NHRA.
Two donated feed scales, needed to weigh cars, were buried in the sand, and the names of paid advertisers were written on car hubcaps. It wasn’t long before Dust Devils team members were claiming national records and becoming one of the most visible and best clubs in the country. They even allowed women drivers when the notion was mostly shunned elsewhere. Legendary driver Eddie Hill turned pro at the track in 1959.
After some members witnessed the use of a “Christmas tree” – a device, using a series of lights, to start cars on a ¼ mile drag run – at some 1963 races in Indianapolis, the contraption became the next on an items-to-have list. No track in California had one. The following year, the Dust Devils offered to stage a major race being held in southern California for an asking fee of – you guessed it – one Christmas tree, which they gladly received, and later loaned to tracks far and wide when it didn’t interfere with their own operations.
People who love the sport keep coming back, despite the distance for many, heat, sand, and its, well, its littleness. There’s an aura about the place, a special lie of the land, but in the final analysis, it’s the Dust Devils’ hospitality that apparently fosters such devotion to this particular strip of asphalt in the desert.
“The first time I went to Inyokern was for a car show and drag race back in 1962,” said Bruce Schwartz. “I went back in 1990 and it really had not changed at all. The people there are great and very accommodating to the racers. They treat everyone very well, so I kept coming back”
Schwartz liked it so well that he became the track announcer at Inyokern. He makes the three-hour drive regularly from his home in Torrance. The February weather problem, and Vin Diesel’s latest movie snafu in March, had kept him idle, a situation not experienced often by those associated with the long-running drag strip.
“February is typically a bad month for weather in this part of the desert. Periodically, there are winds that they call dust devils that come through. We just wait a few seconds and then resume racing.”
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NHRA start
Born on the backroads of America in the post World War II years, drag racing's roots were planted on dry lake beds like Muroc in California's Mojave Desert, where hot rodders had congregated since the early 1930s and speeds first topped 100 mph.
Wally Parks
One could even argue that drag racing was born in Goltry, Okla., in 1913, with the birth of Wally Parks, who nearly four decades later would found drag racing's most successful and influential sanctioning body.
Parks' family moved to California in the early 1920s, and Parks had an early interest in cars. He attended his first dry lake speed trials event in the 1930s, which whetted his fascination for performance. In 1937, Parks was one of the founders of the Road Runners Club.
Organized drag racing
In 1947, Parks, a military tank test-driver for General Motors who served in the army in the South Pacific in World War II, helped organize the Southern California Timing Association and later became its general manager.
The first SCTA "Speed Week," held at the famed Bonneville Salt Flats in 1949, was the result of a diligent effort of Parks, then its executive secretary. It was here that racers first began running "against the clock" - actually, a stopwatch - coaxing their vehicles to accelerate quicker rather than simply to attain high top speeds.
The first drag strip, the Santa Ana Drags, began running on an airfield in Southern California in 1950, and quickly gained popularity among the Muroc crowd because of its revolutionary computerized speed clocks.
When Parks became editor of the monthly enthusiast magazine Hot Rod, he had the forum and the power to form the National Hot Rod Association in 1951 to "create order from chaos" by instituting safety rules and performance standards that helped legitimize the sport. He was its first president.
NHRA's first races
NHRA held its first official race in April 1953, on a slice of the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds parking lot in Pomona, Calif. Four decades later, that track has undergone a $6-million expansion and renovation and hosts the NHRA season-opening Winternationals and the season finale, the Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals. The aggressive upgrading of facilities to 'stadium' quality, with fan amenities, VIP towers, and tall grandstands, was the passion of NHRA President Dallas Gardner, who took the reins in 1984 when Parks became Board Chairman. In 2000, Tom Compton became just the third president in NHRA history as Gardner ascended to the role of broad chairman and Parks became chairman of the NHRA Motorsports Museum.
In 1955, NHRA staged its first national event, called simply "the Nationals" in Great Bend, Kan. Six years later, as the Nationals hop-scotched around the country to showcase the growing sport before settling in Indianapolis in 1961, the Winternationals became NHRA's second event.
Incredible success
Now in its fifth decade, NHRA is the world's largest motorsports sanctioning body with 80,000 members, 140 member tracks, more than 35,000 licensed competitors, and more than 5,000 member-track events.
"No one could have conceived what has happened," Parks said of the NHRA's tremendous growth and success. "But we did have ambitions of its becoming a national sports entity. We weren't planning or marketing geniuses or anything like that. Things happened and we went with our instincts.
"We just had an idea and a strong desire to be self-sustaining ... to control our own destiny and be our own masters. We wanted to build the organization on its own merit. We saw a need -- that being an avenue for safe drag racing -- and with the help of a lot of good people and a little luck we seem to have had some success."
About the term "drag racing"
Although the tiretracks of its history are clear, the origin of the term "drag racing" is not. The theories are almost as many and varied as the machines that have populated its ranks for five decades. Explanations range from a simple challenge ("Drag your car out of the garage and race me!") to geographical locale (the "main drag" was a city's main street, often the only one wide enough to accommodate two vehicles), to the mechanical (to "drag" the gears meant to hold the transmission in gear longer than normal).
The first "dragsters" were little more than street cars with lightly warmed-over engines and bodies chopped down to reduce weight. Eventually, professional chassis builders constructed purpose-built cars, bending and welding together tubing and planting the engine in the traditional spot, just in front of the driver; the engines, and the fuels they burned, became more exotic, more powerful, and, naturally, more temperamental.
Like almost all racing cars, they have undergone tremendous evolution as racers upgraded, experimented, theorized, and tested their equipment.
Safety and innovation paved the way to rear-engined Top Fuel cars in the early 1970s, and once drag racing legend Don Garlits - himself a victim of the front-engined configuration when his transmission, which was nestled between his feet, exploded in 1970, severing half of his right foot - perfected the design, the sport never looked back. Today's Top Fuel dragsters are computer-designed wonders with sleek profiles and wind-tunnel-tested rear airfoils that exert 5,000 pounds of downforce on the rear tires with minimal aerodynamic drag.
As racers became smarter, the speed barriers fell: 260 mph toppled in 1984; 270 in 1986; 280 in 1987; 290 in 1989: and the magic 300 mph barrier fell before the wheels of former Funny Car champion Kenny Bernstein on March 20, 1992. Just seven years later, Tony Schumacher became the first to top 330 mph in February 1999, in Phoenix, Ariz.
Good enough
hmmmmm then what is everything else 
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