WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: RON HORNADAY : Inherit the Wins : Son Drove Dreams to Reality, Became Saugus Champion Like Dad

The year was 1954 when Ron Hornaday Sr. and his wife, Helen, piled into a new Ford for an overnight drive to Phoenix from the San Fernando Valley. Wearisome as the trek was, there was no talk of fatigue. Hornaday had a race to drive in.

So Helen went into the stands, where she sat for every race of Hornaday’s long and prosperous race car driving days up and down the West Coast. And Hornaday took that same Ford onto the track for 100 intense miles.

“We broke a headlight, blew a couple of tires,” Hornaday says. “Then we drove it back to the Valley right after the race and got a ticket for having no headlight.”

Helen laughs.

“Those were the days,” she says.

Those were the days, indeed. The days when Hornaday dominated short tracks from Tijuana to Spokane. The days when Hornaday won consecutive Winston Cup West championships (1963-’64) then followed in 1965 at Saugus Speedway with one of the most dominating years in the track’s history.

And those were the days when a tyke named Ron Jr., born in 1958, traveled with his famous daddy up and down the coast, leaving on Fridays and returning late, late Sunday nights, asleep in the back of the car, with the thrill of racing filling his dreams.

“It was neat going to school after all the other kids had read my dad’s name in the papers,” says Ron Hornaday Jr. of Palmdale, a former Saugus champion himself and current third-place driver on the NASCAR Southwest Tour. “I wore my racing jacket all the time. You always felt like you had something on everybody else.”

In those days, little Ron did. His dad--who will be honored, along with dozens of other past greats at Saugus Speedway’s Reunion Night tonight at 7--dominated West Coast short-track racing from the 1950s to the mid-1970s like few others.

What’s more, he did it in a Ford while nearly all other drivers rode the more-popular Chevrolets. Ron Sr., 59, worked for the Valley’s Galpin Ford agency--where he still works today as director of service and parts--and his boss, Frank Galpin, wouldn’t hear of his employee/star driver riding in a Chevrolet.

To this day, Hornaday, an Inglewood High graduate now living in Simi Valley, remains one of only two drivers in Saugus history to win a points championship in a Ford. And that 1965 campaign was one to remember, according to three-time points champion Dave Phipps, who as a teen-ager watched Hornaday from the stands.

“It seemed like he won every race,” Phipps says. “He was so smooth, very fast, very steady. I never really remember him tearing up his car, he was so smooth. I mean, he just dominated.”

And racing dominated the family. Hornaday says that when he married Helen in 1952--he met her when he filled her tank one day at his job at a gas station--it was a match made in checkered-flag heaven. Helen, a racing aficionado, has kept score and taken notes for her husband and her son every lap of the way.

She also kept an eye on the kids as her husband raced on various tracks in the West. Youngsters can get restless on seemingly endless summer weekends on which you leave early Friday and drive all day to race that night somewhere on the coast. The same pattern followed on Saturday, and again on Sunday, until the long drive back from, say, Stockton, only to leave again the next Friday.

“Anything to get out of school,” Ron Jr. says with a laugh. “Traveling? I didn’t know the difference. It was always just a new track and a new pit gate to me.”

Behind the pit gate were the rough-and-tumble drivers of the 1950s and 1960s, when differences were not settled by race officials but by bare knuckles.

“Things were a little more carefree,” says Hornaday. “We had a lot more of putting people through the fence, and then you had your fistfights in the pits afterwards.”

Fistfights?

“Oh, yeah, continually,” he says. “Afterwards, you come into the pits and you’d have your fights.”

Fighting and racing and racing and fighting must have seemed like an appealing trade to young Ron Jr. He remembers it all and remembers that since his earliest days, racing was just something to which he gravitated naturally.

His dad used to let him help in the garage, fetching parts and peering under the hood. Nothing like a first-hand education to get a 7-year-old racer going.

“We wouldn’t stop until about 2 a.m.,” the younger Hornaday said. “But I wasn’t old enough to go to the track with him. I used to go with my mom, and then at intermission, all the little kids of the drivers would go out (around) the trees and (hold footraces) among ourselves.”

It was this dedication to his family and his job that prevented Ron Sr. from heading back East to race in the prestigious--and lucrative--Winston Cup tour. Twice, he was invited by NASCAR as the Winston West champion, but both times he declined. Regrets, however, do not plague Hornaday.

“None, really,” he says. “I had an obligation to my family. I wished I had the opportunity to race at Daytona and be competitive, but we never sacrificed the family for racing.”

It’s not as if Hornaday never had a chance to have his name in lights. In 1964, he was chosen to do some stunt driving for a movie called “Red Line 7000,” featuring a no-name actor named James Caan as a race-car driver.

In Hornaday’s scene, he was to play the girlfriend of Caan who took to the wheel in a fit of anger and crashed the car into a fence.

“So they put a blond wig on me,” Hornaday remembers, “and another stunt man in the passenger seat. And I told him not to worry, that I knew what I was doing and we’d be OK. It was only later that I found out that this same stuntman had jumped out an airplane without a parachute on.”

Hornaday laughs in admiration of a fellow daredevil. But Hornaday, known in his day for his exciting wins after consistently starting at the back of the pack (fastest qualifiers started in the back), finally came to a day when he realized that he had had enough.

“It was a race in Portland that I won,” Hornaday says of the race in 1975. Trouble with his exhaust pipe and brakes had left him a battered man. “My foot was burnt and I was breathing fumes and I got out of the car and I said, ‘I quit.’ ”

All the while, the younger Hornaday followed the path to racing stardom. In fact, he knew he was hooked when, the day after Evel Knievel had brought his jumping act to the Coliseum, Ron and some friends decided to vault 19 bicycles lined up in a row. Ron cleared 18 successfully and woke up in the hospital with a broken collarbone.

Shortly, his dad walked in, carrying a tricycle. The elder Hornaday set the tricycle down, stared at his boy and said, “Son, it’s about time you started over.”

Smiles abounded--and the younger Hornaday’s career was off and flying.

His first Sportsman car was built by his father in 1980 and Ron Jr. wound up finishing a close second in the points standings to ex-schoolmate Jon Covan. Then, after winning two consecutive “most improved driver” awards in 1981 and 1982, Ron Jr. fell on moderately hard times. Misfortune and poor race cars taught him much about survival on the track until 1987, when he raced back to glory and took the Sportsman points championship.

Now, he sits primed to make a run for the points championship heading into September’s stretch run of the Southwest Tour.

“Ronny’s a much better driver than I ever was,” says his father. “I always told him to be fair, drive clean, run hard and run to win. If you don’t run to win, then don’t race. Ronny had a goal to win at Saugus and he did. Now he has the determination to win the Southwest Tour. Oh, definitely, he’s the better driver.”

But son is mindful of father’s wealth of experience. He still calls him when things go wrong and asks him about the little things it takes to be a great racer. And father still religiously follows son’s career. So much so, for example, that Ron Sr. will watch a race on tape in which Ron Jr. leads until the final laps, when a mishap occurs, costing him the race. But before the mishap, Ron Sr. ejects the tape and goes to sleep.

“That way, I think he won it,” says the father.

The younger Hornaday is openly in the market for a sponsor to push his team one step further--to the bigger-money Winston West tour, where he is certain that success would land him on the Winston Cup tour. And in the meantime, he tends to his 11-year-old son named--what else?--Ron Hornaday III.

“We’ve gotta watch out for this one,” Ron Jr. says. “He’s racing already. He raced the Go-Karts up at Bakersfield. I mean, he loves it.”

He isn’t kidding. Ron Jr. married the daughter of former Saugus great Wild Bill Foster.

“We’ve got genes in this kid,” he says with a laugh.

Certainly, enough to make a grandfather proud.