End of a Long Journey : It Was 1963 When NASCAR First Came to Riverside

Stock car racing was just out of its infancy in 1963 when Les Richter convinced NASCAR founder Bill France to bring his traveling circus to Riverside International Raceway.

It was a revolutionary move.

The sport, an outgrowth of the moonshine era when fast cars sped through the back roads of the Carolinas delivering their White Lightning during the week, and then got together and raced on Sundays, was just beginning to take on a national character.

It was also strictly an oval racing sport. All the turns were left and all the cars were built to run their best on the high-banked tracks in Darlington, S.C.; Daytona Beach, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C.

But Richter, only a year after retiring as as All-Pro linebacker for the Rams, was persuasive. He convinced France that the stock car folks needed a Southern California market and that Riverside was the place, even though it was a twisting road-racing track rather than a tidy oval.

Not too many of the Southern good ol’ boys came West for that January race in 1963, and those who did were not pleased with what they saw. Little Joe Weatherly, the NASCAR champion, was here, and so were Fireball Roberts, Ned Jarrett, Fred Lorenzen, Wendell Scott and two youngsters, Richard Petty and David Pearson.

“It was pretty embarrassing, trying to get up through them switchbacks without running off in the dirt,” Petty recalls with amusement. “For the first few years, they wasn’t any way at all I could make it all the way around without kicking up some dust here and there.’

More embarrassing to the Southern boys was that it took them seven years before they could win a 500-mile race at Riverside. Dan Gurney, a sports car driver, won five of the first six, and Parnelli Jones, the Indianapolis 500 winner, won the other.

It was perhaps fitting that the first winner from Dixie was Petty, stock car racing’s all-time winner with 200 checkered flags and all-time champion with seven Winston Cup trophies.

“It wasn’t any big deal in winning out here,” Petty said. “It was just like driving on the back roads at home. There were just more people chasing me.”

Today, in the Budweiser 400, the final stock car race at Riverside, Petty will be out there, driving in his 44th NASCAR race on the 2.62-mile road course. He has won five of them.

The track will be bulldozed next month to make way for a shopping mall and housing development.

“I’m going to miss this place,” said Petty, who will be 51 Aug. 2. “We’ve been coming out here from Level Cross (N.C.) since before Kyle was born, and now he’s been racing here eight years himself. That tells you how long it’s been since that first year, but Riverside has been good to me over the years.

“The drivers are going to miss coming out here once or twice a year, but the real losers are the cats who live in Southern California. They are going to be without a place to watch racing, what with Ontario gone and now Riverside about to go.”

Darrell Waltrip, who didn’t see Riverside until 1975 but has made the most of it since with five wins and a record nine poles, is indignant about the track’s closing.

“It ought to be on the National Historical Register and preserved forever,” Waltrip said. “It’s been here longer than some places that have been saved, and it’s a doggone shame that the most famous road-racing track in the country is going down the drain.

“I’ll admit, I hated it when I first saw the place in ’75 because I’d never driven on a road so confining. Of course, I’d done a lot of racing on the roads back home, but they had trees and intersections and things like that. But when I got over that, I began to love the place.

“I hate it that it’s about to close. They, whoever they are, should never have let things go this far. Like I said, it ought to be on the National Historical Register.”

Waltrip’s last win here, in the June race in 1986, was one of the most memorable in the long series.

“I passed (Tim) Richmond coming out of (Turn) 9 to take the white flag after he and I and Terry (Labonte) had swapped the lead back and forth all day,” he said. The margin of victory was 4 feet.

Labonte’s memories of that race are not so pleasant.

“A tire let go on the start of the last lap and threw me into the wall on the first turn,” he recalled. “The Olds was totaled, and when I opened my eyes, it was like stars were floating all around the cockpit.”

That wasn’t Labonte’s worst accident here, however.

In 1982, in the season-ending Winston Western 500, something in the steering broke in the Buick he was driving and the car hit the abutment at the end of the concrete wall at Turn 9. The sudden impact left Labonte with a severely cut face, a broken foot and cracked ribs.

“I knew I was hurt because I was looking at a couple of rescue workers trying to get me out and they were crying. I thought, ‘This must be bad.’ ”

Such memories help give Labonte a feeling of ambivalence about the closing of Riverside.

“I don’t know if I’ll miss it or not,” he said. “It’ll probably depend on how we do Sunday. I guess I have sort of a love-hate relationship about the track. I’ve had some good times here, like the time I won the championship in 1984. We came out here having to beat Harry Gant to win the Winston Cup, and I won the pole and finished third.

“I still think I might have won the race, too, but along toward the end, Dale (Inman, crew chief) called me on the radio and told me that Harry was way back and to be careful. I wanted to race with Bobby Allison and Richmond for the win, but I could tell from the tone of Dale’s voice that he didn’t think it would be a good idea.

“I guess I’m too young (31) to feel much about the history here. I was only 2 when NASCAR ran its first race here. That was a little early for me to be driving, but I wouldn’t mind being in the history books as the last winner here, though.”

Although Richter and France started bringing stock cars to Riverside in 1963, the first NASCAR race on the track was on June 1, 1958. It was a 500-mile race called the Crown American 500 and it was run counter-clockwise, the opposite way from today’s race and all the other Riverside races.

It almost didn’t come off.

Promoter Al Slonicker put together a package of midget, sprint car and stock car races, and when few spectators showed up for the preliminaries, there was some question as to Slonicker’s ability to meet the $15,700 purse.

France flew out from Florida and demanded cash in hand before he would let his drivers race. Once Big Bill was satisfied, the race west on with Eddie Gray, the reigning Pacific Coast late model stock car champion from Gardena, winning in a 1957 Mercury. Gray collected $3,200. Lloyd Dane of Buena Park was second, and Lee Petty, Richard’s father and a three-time NASCAR champion himself, was fourth.

The Crown American 500 took 6 hours 17 minutes to run as Gray averaged 79.522 m.p.h.

Racing was more primitive in those days. One of the competitors, a sprint car driver named Jack Rounds, finished 12th in a ’57 Chevy that he borrowed from his girlfriend. The car, according to the late racing historian Ronnie Allyn, was strictly stock except for a rollbar Rounds installed.

After the race, Rounds and his girlfriend drove the car home and celebrated with the $150 prize money he won.

The first Pacific Coast Late Model Division race here--a forerunner of the Winston West race that will be run today as part of the Budweiser 400--was held May 19, 1963, and was won by a young sports car driver from Philadelphia named Roger Penske. Yes, the same Roger Penske who now owns and runs the all-conquering Indy car team of Rick Mears, Danny Sullivan and Al Unser.

Weatherly, the NASCAR champion from Norfolk, Va., was in the race and finished second, even though there were Grand National races that same weekend in Manassas, Va., and Richmond.

The drivers were wilder in those days, too.

When Curtis Turner wearied of trying to explain the art of a bootleg turn to Bud Tucker, a Southern California sportswriter, he demonstrated on the freeway--making a 180-degree turn virtually on a dime. When the car suddenly headed in the opposite direction, Tucker wasn’t the only one shocked. So was a highway patrolman.

When the officer corraled Turner, however, he was so impressed with the maneuver that he had him do it again--thus heading the car in the proper direction again.

“Damnedest thrill I ever had,” Tucker said. “That car flipped around so fast, it scared the hell out of me. Pops (Turner’s nickname) just sat there, laughing like crazy. Then he sweet-talked that cop out of a ticket.”

Tragedy has played its part in Riverside’s stock car history, too.

Three prominent West Coast drivers--Tim Williamson, Bill Spencer and Sonny Easley--were killed here in separate racing accidents.

The most prominent driver who was killed here, however, was Weatherly. In January of 1964, he slid his ’64 Mercury into the wall between Turns 5 and 6 in the Motor Trend 500. The car wasn’t traveling at high speed, but Weatherly was not wearing a shoulder harness. When the car made contact, his head hit the wall.

Weatherly was one of NASCAR’s most popular drivers and had won the driving championship the two previous years.

“When Little Joe got killed, it just about tore up all the old-timers who’d been around stock stock car racing since it started,” Turner was quoted at the time. “It was fellows like Joe who made it fun.”

Weatherly was been a superstitious soul who hated No. 13. His friends found eerie circumstances surrounding his death--he flew to California on flight No. 13, was the 13th-fastest qualifier, crashed on the leader’s 113th lap, and had $13 in his wallet.

Riverside International Raceway will disappear soon, but a map of the track will remain forever in a cemetery in Norfolk, Va. On Little Joe’s headstone, there is a diagram of the road-racing track, with an X at the point where he hit the wall.