THE STOCKYARD : Saugus Speeway, Once a Ranch Alive With Livestock, Has Served for 27 Years as a Farm for Stock Car Drivers

It is the weekend. Night clubs, theatres and arenas are alive with music. And fireplaces are crackling throughout the neighborhood.

But for some people, there is only one Friday or Saturday night sound.

It is the frenzied sound of a supercharged, overhead cam, twin-dome, eight-cylinder, 500 horsepower, Stroker-cranked turbo engine fed by a throbbing four-barrel carburetor and powering a five-speed, high-torque transmission, all of which sits upon a custom chassis supported by MacPherson front struts, trailing-arms with camber control, semi-trailing links and Watt linkage.

For about 35 nights each year since 1959, thousands who know what that stuff means have gathered at Saugus Speedway to watch people climb into machines that sound as if they’ve just killed something large and plan to kill again.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the mid-1920s, what is now Saugus Speedway was, in essence, the Saugus steedway. Real horsepower ruled then, horses that consumed hay, not gasoline and fuel alcohol, and left behind them not smoldering black rubber to stick permanently to the track but rather something that stayed on the ground only until a man arrived with shovel and bucket.

Roy Baker, a Santa Clarita Valley cattle rancher, had built a rodeo arena on the site and called it Baker Ranch Stadium. It was later owned by Hoot Gibson, who gained fame as a movie cowboy long before Gene Autry came along. Back then, Autry was so young he was halfway between being “Back in the Saddle Again” and “Back in the Diapers Again.”

After a massive flood in the mid-’30s, the property was purchased by cattle rancher Bill Bonelli, who renamed it Bonelli Stadium. He booted out the horses and bulls of the rodeo in 1939 and ushered in the era of auto racing, attracting crowds of more than 10,000 to watch midget cars and later the giant roadsters as they churned around the dirt track.

In 1959, the same year that the Daytona International Speedway was built in Florida and the U.S. welcomed Alaska as its 49th state, Bonelli gave birth to the Saugus Speedway, changing its name and an era of racing in Southern California at the same time. Gone were the midgets and the giants, and in came the early stock cars, the stripped-down-and-rebuilt Oldsmobiles, Fords, Hudsons, Chevrolets, Plymouths, Chryslers, Buicks and Pontiacs.

To walk through Saugus Speedway today is like taking a walk back to those days when Eisenhower was a president and not the name of a hospital, to days when shoes were made of real leather and women’s pants weren’t. The wooden bleachers that were built in 1924 still stand, brought back to life by a fresh coat of white paint but still retaining their rickety-looking charm. Nostalgia buffs can sit and ponder the distinct possibility that the same sharp wood splinter now sticking painfully into their rump could have been responsible for giving a cowboy actor named Gibson the nickname “Hoot.”

The site was silent from 1942 to 1945, when most American males who wanted to be drivers were sent to Europe and offered a choice--tanks or troop trucks. Racing resumed after the war in the fall of 1945. In 1946, the flat, dirt track became a flat, asphalt track. But a combination of bad asphalt and good racing turned the track back to dirt just a year later. It was repaved, though, and except for the addition of a few refreshment stands, remains pretty much intact today.

Marshall Wilkings was the glue that held Saugus Speedway together during the ‘70s and ‘80s, a time when the rising costs of insurance and other racing-related necessities forced many small auto racing tracks around the country to fold faster than a bad poker player. He owned and ran the concessions at the track for many years and became the track’s promoter and general manager. Under his guidance, the track began offering larger purses and guaranteed purses, and it became one of the most popular and successful short tracks in the nation. Revenues are boosted greatly by swap meets that lure up to 20,000 people every Sunday.

Wilkings died in 1985, but the track remained highly successful. His son, Ray, now the promoter and general manager, said attendance averaged about 3,200 for each of the 35 racing programs during the 1986 season, which ended Saturday night. But the younger Wilkings believes that the track has reached its growth limit. Admission is $7 for adults, and Wilkings said he doesn’t want it to go any higher. For most 1986 racing programs, the total purse was about $15,000.

“With insurance costs going out of sight and other overhead costs going up all the time, I think we’ve reached the saturation point for racing purses,” he said. “The level of sophistication of the racing machines has kind of gotten out of control. We’re at a point now where it’s sort of the guy who pours the most money into his car has the best chance of winning, and that’s probably not good.

“We have to return to the time when this was just a hobby for the drivers, where they worked on their own cars and squeezed the most speed and power from it without spending thousands of dollars. We’ve got to go back to the cheaper motors and cheaper cars where the drivers win races on their ability, not on the amount of money they can spend on the car.”

Although the sophistication of the machines at the track may have risen over the years, the fans remain a throwback to the old days. If you see a BMW pulling into the parking lot off Soledad Canyon Road, its driver is probably just turning around to get back to the mall. If you see a three-piece suit in this crowd, bet the house and the pet beagle that it’s made of asbestos. And if you want to find any natural cotton fibers among this group, look not at their clothes but rather in their ears, where wads of it deflect and soften some of the noise by the roaring and belching racing engines.

Saugus Speedway has compiled an excellent safety record over the decades. There have been only three fatalities, and two of those involved accidents in the pits. But Wilkings knows that auto racing fans don’t exactly shield their eyes from events that feature good old-fashioned, wham-bam-thank-you-Buick smashups. So he’s kept alive one tradition at the track, the Figure-8 race, in which cars meet at an intersection at 70 and 80 m.p.h. and the car on the right does not have the right of way, or any rights at all for that matter.

And this year, Wilkings introduced another event called Destruction Football. Two teams, five cars and drivers to a team, all try to push a ball across a goal line with their screaming, crashing vehicles. The ball? A 5-foot-wide, steel buoy, what else?

“We tried using a Volkswagen filled with cement on a skid pad, but that didn’t work,” Wilkings said. “Then we tried a bunch of tires chained together, and that didn’t work either. So this guy comes in here and tells me if I give him $400 he’ll go to Montana and bring back this steel buoy that he says will be just perfect for a ball.

“For some reason, I gave him the $400. I kissed it goodby. But a month later the guy comes rolling in here towing this giant steel buoy. Said they used it for a marker in some river in Montana or something. I didn’t ask too much else about it. It’s been great, though. It’s worked perfectly.”

Soccer for Buicks. Probably not what Hoot Gibson had in mind when he bought the place more than half a century ago. But then again, not many people in the Santa Clarita Valley today would pay $7 to see some guy on a horse in the films, “Shotgun Jones,” or “The Galloping Kid,” now would they?