Driven by Dreams : Newbury Park’s Holguin Finally Has a Fast Car That Just May Be the Ticket He Needs to Break Into Big-Time Auto Racing

The late 1960s at Riverside Raceway: Charlie Holguin begins a life-long love affair with auto racing. But it’s not the heavy-metal sound of the engines or the Technicolor blur of the action that romances him. Holguin, a youngster, falls for the chrome and the stainless steel, the gleaming skin of the beast.

While his father Claude works as chief mechanic, fixing the engines of cars, Charlie gets the job of his dreams, polishing and buffing, making the paint shine. “Here I was, a little kid, hanging around these huge machines since I was old enough to stand, and being allowed to work on them,” Holguin says. “It was so fantastic.”

Race cars still fascinate Holguin, now 25 and a resident of Newbury Park, but his tastes and expectations are no longer as simple as they were when he was “growing up at Riverside.”

Five years ago, Holguin won the International Karting Federation’s national championship in the super stock light class, and 2 years ago he graduated to road-racing cars capable of speeds of 150 m.p.h. This weekend, he gets his biggest break when he drives Stuart Belshe’s new SC 89 Tiga in the Palm Springs Grand Prix.

Although Holguin has benefitted from his father’s connections in auto racing and his own years of experience, he still had problems overcoming the toughest obstacle: money. He was always operating on a shoestring budget in an expensive sport, where a set of tires costs about $500 and lasts about 1 race.

“I couldn’t even afford to get my engine tuned,” he says. “I’d wind up buying used tires from guys I’d just raced against.”

Holguin had not competed in a race until a family friend, Jim Paul, let him drive his car for 5 laps at Willow Springs in Kern County in 1986. Holguin surprised everybody by coming within a half-second of Paul’s fastest lap.

He was a natural.

“The instant I got behind the wheel, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” Holguin says.

What did Paul see in Holguin? “Charlie clearly has the ability to drive fast,” says Paul, a veteran driver who recently completed 25 years as a member of the Sports Car Club of America. “He’s also very single-minded about wanting to be a racer. So when the opportunity presented itself, I thought it would be a good idea to give him the chance. And he was fast right away.”

Buoyed by his first racing experience, Holguin, with the help of his father, scraped together $6,000 and bought an 8-year-old Formula Ford. His father had taught him to drive in karts--”He drilled me on what makes a good race driver,” Holguin says. “You got to be smooth as glass, you got to have excellent car control, and you got to be prepared”--but Holguin also took a course at Riverside.

Holguin began entering club races, finishing consistently in the top 3. He soon moved up to the American City Racing League Pro Series, selling the Ford and buying Paul’s car, an SC 79 Tiga, for $13,000. Holguin had no problem arranging a bank loan. Since 15, he has been working as a machinist at Pacific Designs, a Burbank company owned by Skeeter McKitterick, a well-known local racer.

Dogged by bad luck in ‘87--blown tires, broken gear shifts--Holguin won his first 4 races this year but still wasn’t making any money. Although he competed in the Sports 2000 class, the class was divided into new and old cars. He’d win the old-car division, finish among the top 15 overall, and make about $200. The winner of the new-car class took home $4,500.

During his travels, Holguin met Belshe, a West Side driver who owns Advanced Racing Operations, a distributor for the British-made Tiga. Belshe drove against Holguin and liked what he saw--”He was impressed to see how fast I went with the old equipment,” Holguin says.

When Belshe needed a driver for the $35,500--without the engine--radically designed Tiga, he approached Holguin.

“Charlie is aggressive but uses finesse because of his karting experience,” Belshe says. “He has the ability to make quick and generally right decisions and always uses his head.”

Holguin is a bachelor who still lives with his parents in Newbury Park. “I couldn’t afford to race and live on my own,” he says.

Racing, obviously, is his top priority.

“I want to make something of it,” he says. “I’m not doing it just for fun. I love to race, but it’s a business.”

His long-term goal is racing Indy cars. “I’d love to drive them,” he says. “But that’s a little ways off. It’ll take a lot of money, but nothing is impossible.”

Last summer, Holguin returned to Riverside for the sentimental last race in that track’s history. Driving an SC 84 Tiga borrowed from Paul, Holguin, the boy who started out polishing cars at Riverside, outshined the competition and won the older-car division, setting a single-lap track record for his class--1 minute, 56 seconds.

“I was ecstatic,” Holguin says. “That’s one record that will never be broken.”

In the Riverside race, Holguin was on a team with Paul, who drove an 86 Tiga. Paul won his class for newer cars, and Holguin, despite driving the older car, finished right behind him. Both lapped the second-place driver in Paul’s class.

“We left everybody for dead,” Paul says.

And what does Paul think of Holguin’s potential? “He can be great.”