Stock-Car Driver Is Waiting for a Break

Most days you’ll find Marcus Mallett at Rex’s Auto Parts on Main Street in county territory just north of Carson, but his thoughts are back in the garage of his Gardena home where a black IROC Z stock car waits to be tinkered with.

Mallett envisions a career as a full-time professional stock-car racer, but for now, wearing a sweat shirt and hat covered with grease, Mallett mans the telephones in the wooden shed. Someday, says a man struggling to be noticed, all of this will be behind me.

“I don’t want to have to go to the yard and run that place every day,” Mallett said.

Trouble is, this is Southern California, not known to have a lot of stock-car fanatics. Further, he is black, which he says works against him in a sport long dominated by drivers from the South.

“Most people look at color first and then drivin’ ability,” he said.

Mallett may have furthered his dream of a pro career a couple of weeks ago when he picked up his first victory on asphalt in the IROC Z at Saugus Speedway. A few weeks earlier he made history when he became the first black racer to win a stock-car event on the dirt track at Ascot Park in Gardena. He now has won four races at Ascot.

The significance of his first victory at Ascot overshadowed the fact that he has been one of the most consistent performers there in the last five years. In the Curb Motorsports NASCAR Winston Racing Series, he was second overall a year ago and third in 1986. That, he says, is testimony to his ability, and now it’s time for a major stock-car sponsor to give him a break.

None seems ready. Big cities and stock racing have never hit it off. Populous Southern California is the bush leagues of short-track auto racing. The prize money on the West Coast just isn’t that good. An average dirt race nets only $500 for the winner. In the Midwest and South, the money would be three times that.

His Saugus performance may have landed him a parts sponsorship from a Gardena cam shop, but the fact remains that a new motor costs about $12,000. Mallett says he has never made more than $10,000 in any year, and things are no better now, despite the best start of his career.

“Times are hard. I have two boys. I’ve got to bring them up,” he said. “I can’t starve them.”

Subtle racism off the track is one of his biggest competitors, he says. His wife, Lori, who is white, has been subjected to racial slurs at some races, he adds, though Mallett is quick to point out that fellow drivers do not take part in that.

“Most of the drivers accept me as a driver,” he said. “It’s the people in the stands (who carry on).”

Mallett is frustrated because what he sees as a large black business community in Los Angeles has yet to discover him. Reality, he acknowledges, is that big-money men seldom venture west of the Mississippi River. Yet he wonders aloud what it would be like if he was a black man trying to break into stocks somewhere in the South.

“It might be worse,” he said.

Marcus’ father, Walt, through the family business, has paid most of his son’s racing bills. Last year he spent “about $40,000.” Marcus returns the favor by working in the auto parts business, which Walt has owned for 27 years.

“I hate to keep soaking my old man,” Marcus said. “I want to take the pressure off him and let him come to the track to have some fun.”

Rex’s is a fine place if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, or if you’re interested in a good price on a used foreign auto part, but it’s not where Marcus wants to spend the rest of his life. Between queries for parts over an intercom system that links area junkyards, Mallett’s thoughts drift to his 1986 dirt stock Trans Am being repaired a few blocks away.

On a slow day there’s another stock car out in the yard to tinker with. It looks out of place amid stacks of wrecked Fiats and Mazdas, but that 1976 Monte Carlo brings back memories. Its right side was bashed in during its last Enduro race, a grueling, slamming, banging tangle of smoking autos.

Mallett moves through the dirt and grime from cracked pistons and snapped cams. Motor oil stains the adobe ground a purplish black. Grime clings to everything. Palms are constantly dirty, and anyone who works or visits there leaves with odors of auto fluids in their clothes.

Rex’s is a junk parts business that Walt renamed after a dead dog when he relocated seven years ago. A former General Motors auto worker, he runs the place with help from Marcus, an older sister who calls herself “Ms. Deb” and a couple of employees. It’s not unlike a dozen places along Main Street north of the 91 Freeway. But it’s a far cry from where Mallett, 29, was a decade ago as a standout cornerback and shortstop at Cerritos High School.

Mallett envisioned furthering his athletic career after his senior year in high school, but at 5-5 and only 125 pounds, “what future did I have in football?”

But he tried, forsaking baseball and attending Cerritos College. An injury cut him down before his freshman football season. Mallett, forced to redshirt, dropped out of school to work for his father.

He hung around Ascot and heard its stories from customers who frequented the salvage yard. Auto racing intrigued him. About six years ago, Walt, who had done dirt racing in the 1960s, looked at him and said: Why not?

The father-son team scraped together money to buy their first stock car. Mallett’s career was launched. He has moved steadily up the ladder at tiny Ascot since winning rookie of the year honors in 1983. This season he is in a dogfight for first place with archrival and defending Curb champion Ron Meyer of Garden Grove.

Mallett thinks he has a good chance of unseating Meyer, but he also says that running short courses at Ascot will not lead him to the E ticket ride on the pro stock tour. So this season, with the purchase of the IROC Z, which is actually a fiberglass look-alike built on a steel chassis at Professional Racers Emporium of Carson, Mallett is taking to asphalt tracks. He is off to a good start. The Saugus race was only his third on the hard surface. The win was considered a coup because of his inexperience on asphalt and the fact that he out-dueled a pair of local favorites on a flat track.

Meyer, a two-time champion at Ascot, says Mallett would do better if he was more aggressive.

“He’s too nice,” he said. “He probably gives (opponents) more of a break than I do. I use my bumper a lot more. He doesn’t rough up guys. He’s my main competition out there. He’s the only guy you can run side by side with and not get bumped. Everyone else runs into you.”