Off-Road World Championships at Riverside : Look Out for Thompson’s Ridge This Weekend
If you want to watch the finest off-road racers in the world and Baja seems too far, and when you’re in Las Vegas you would rather play the slot machines than stand ankle deep in silt to watch a bunch of dune buggys racing in the desert, the place to be this weekend is Riverside International Raceway.
On a mile-and-a-half course carved alongside Riverside’s famous road racing track, 26 classes of off-road creations will compete in the 14th annual SCORE World Championships.
After a long, hot day of practice Friday, the action starts today at noon.
Today’s program is limited to stadium buggys, baja bugs, motorcycles and the sport’s newest attractions, ATV three-wheelers and four-wheel quads.
The 10-lap main event will feature unlimited single-seaters built for stadium racing. Greg George will defend his Riverside championship against an array of veterans, including Marty Tripps, Jerry Welchel, Al and Butch Arciero, Larry Ragland, Jim Fishback and Bob Gordon.
Trucks, which became the glamour class of off-roading when manufacturers entered the scene, don’t run until Sunday.
Two major races, the Nissan Mini-Metel Challenge for mini-pickups and Four Wheeler magazine’s Heavy Metel Challenge for full-sized pickup trucks, headline Sunday’s program.
“This event (Mini-Metal Challenge) has turned into one of the premier races in all of off-road racing,” said defending champion Ivan Stewart, who drives a Toyota. “With the number of factories involved, it has become extremely important to win.”
There are mini-pickups entered from Ford, Toyota, Mazda, Dodge, Mitsubishi, Chevrolet and Nissan.
Stewart, 41, is a three-time winner of the event and also a winner of the Baja 1,000 and the Mint 400.
Also Sunday, there will be a race for unlimited desert single-seaters, the type that will race the length of Baja, from Ensenada to La Paz, in the Baja 1,000 in November.
Most of the excitement centers on the quarter-mile stretch known as Thompson’s Ridge that parallels the esses section of the road race track.
Thompson’s Ridge was once an iceplant-covered banking between the asphalt track and a retaining wall. In 1974, when Walker Evans was given the task of designing a new track--shorter than the seven-mile circuit that founder Mickey Thompson laid out for his inaugural race in 1973--he experimented with racing along the off-camber ridge, iceplant and all. Evans found it was extremely difficult to keep a vehicle on the ridge unless it was at racing speeds. Anything less and it tended to slide to the bottom.
The iceplant was gone by the end of the day.
Speeds of 100 m.p.h. have been attained while racing along Thompson’s Ridge, but the real excitement comes when two or three buggies or trucks try to race side by side and the top vehicle begins to lose traction and slides down on the lower cars.
Cars rolling over, sometimes cartwheeling, are commonplace along the ridge.
It is like nothing else in off-road racing. In desert races, such as Baja or the Mint, cars are never closely bunched as they are at Riverside. And in stadium races, such as at the Coliseum or Orange Show Stadium, they never approach the speeds they do here.
“Thompson’s Ridge is unique,” said Rod Hall, who has raced his four-wheel-drive trucks everywhere off-roaders run, from Riverside to East Africa, from Baja to the Australian Outback. “I doubt if we’ll ever see anything like it again.”
With Riverside officials maintaining that the track will be closed after this season, this weekend may the last for ridge running, Thompson-style.
