It’s Still Going Strong : Urban Growth Has Crippled Local Racing, but Bill Huth Has Willow Springs Hopping

Riverside International Raceway is gone. Ontario is gone. So are Ascot Park, Orange County Raceway, Corona Raceway and drag strips from Fontana to San Fernando.

The motor racing industry has been virtually shut down in Southern California in the last decade by escalating land values, encroaching urban development and the increased expense of promoting races.

Willow Springs International Raceway, created in 1953, rejuvenated in 1962 and brought to fruition in 1980, is an anomaly.

Ninety miles from Los Angeles, in the shadow of the Tehachapi mountains in wind-swept Antelope Valley, it is far enough away from the housing boom. Yet it is close enough to be perhaps the busiest race track in America.

And one of the most successful--in a totally different manner from most.

Bill Huth, who bought the facility for $115,000 in 1962 when it was overgrown tumbleweeds and overrun with lizards, recently turned down an offer of $30 million from Japanese interests.

“Why would I sell it?” Huth said. “I’m having too much fun running the place.

“In 1979, the last year I leased the track, it grossed $40,000. I doubled that to $80,000 in 1980 and last year we grossed $1.25 million. And this year we’re doing even better,” Huth said.

His original purchase of 230 acres has been expanded to 600 with purchases of adjacent land.

Instead of promoting major events with big purses, big-name drivers and big crowds, Huth runs Willow Springs like a bargain-basement fire sale.

The more events he has, the merrier he is.

This year, as it was last, the track will be busy 52 weekends and most days between. On the schedule are 12 American Road Racing Assn. Formula One motorcycle racing programs; seven Super Production races for unlimited stock cars; four Vintage Auto Racing Assn. races for antique cars; four Sports Car Club of America national and regional club points races; three Skip Barber West sports car races; six rounds of the Western States superkart series; a Western Eastern Racing Assn. 24-hour motorcycle race; a High Desert Racing Assn. off-road championship; an American Indy car Series race in conjunction with the Firefighters Toyota Grand Prix; an American Motorcyclist Assn. national championship road race and time trials, and driving schools for Porsche, Alfa Romeo, Shelby American Cobra and Pantera Owners clubs.

That’s just on the nine-turn, 2.5-mile paved road course that was laid out in 1953 and justly claims to be “The Fastest Road in the West.”

When Riverside International Raceway began to fade away and its closing became inevitable in the early ‘80s, Huth realized that there would be an increased demand for more training and practice facilities, so he built an asphalt skid pad, a seven-turn, three-quarter mile circuit and an 11-turn, 1 1/4-mile circuit he called the Streets of Willow Springs.

“With all the street races these days, you’d be surprised how many teams come here to test their cars under street-racing conditions,” Huth said.

And now there is also Willow Springs Stadium, an oval track that will do double duty as a three-eighths mile paved oval for midgets and stock cars and a half-mile dirt oval for sprint cars.

“I thought about paving the whole oval, but I couldn’t,” he said. “There’s something about seeing those sprint cars sliding in the dirt, spewing clods all over the place, that you can’t get from pavement. I think our track will be unusual, with pavement half way up the oval and another racing surface above that.”

There are no high grandstands on the property. Huth’s idea of grandstands is Little League-style seats no more than six or seven rows high. And there aren’t more than 4,000 of them.

Huth, 67, a 1941 graduate of Burbank High, is a big man with a shock of unruly silver hair. He runs Willow Springs the way another big man, Bill France, ran NASCAR in its early years. When he doesn’t like the rules, he makes new ones.

After watching several motorcycle races during which officials bickered over engine sizes and rule violations before they could decide a winner, Huth formed his own racing organization for unlimited machines and called it Formula USA.

“I got so tired of tear-downs after every race,” Huth said. “I said, ‘Let’s have a race where anything goes, any fuel, any displacement, do anything you want.’ I ran my own series for three years, and it got so popular that I sold the name and the idea to WERA (Western Eastern Racing Assn.) and they took it nationwide. Now it’s the premier road racing series in the country.”

That worked so well that Huth decided to try it with cars, and the Toyota Super Production series was founded. It is for cars of unlimited engine displacement, and there is no rule on maximum or minimum car weights, width or size or tire width or size.

The Super Production series, featuring points leader Steve Anderson of Las Vegas in a Pontiac, will be in action this weekend in conjunction with Cal Club regional championship points races.

Curiously, the type of racing that brought Huth to Willow Springs in 1962 is not conducted at his Willow Springs Motorsports Park.

“I had a muffler and speed shop in Lancaster at the time, and I was looking around for a place to put a quarter-mile drag strip,” he said.

“I had raced an old Austin Healy at Willow Springs a few years before, so I drove out there one day in my ’60 Olds and (the track) was a mess. The third turn was a washout covered with sand and rocks, and there were weeds everywhere. But I measured the straightaway and it was a half-mile. I figured that was long enough for the drag racers that would be running on it.

“I looked up the owner, and when he said I could have it for $115,000, I told him all I had for a down payment was $100. He took it, and I had myself a race track. I held my first drag race on March 17, 1962, and, wouldn’t you know, it snowed.”

Several months later, Huth was trying to conduct a drag race with the wind blowing so fiercely that it was almost impossible to see through the sand and silt when a man in a suit and tie tapped him on the shoulder and introduced himself.

“My name is Wes Cooley and I am president of the American Federation of Motorcyclists,” he said. “I would like to use your track to race motorcycles.”

Huth agreed, cleaned the sand off Turn 3 and dragged brush off the edge of the track until it looked presentable.

“I watched the motorcycles and they put on a hell of a show,” Huth recalled. “I decided then that the track was going to be more than just a drag strip.

“The next thing I knew, the Cal Club wanted to use the track, but they said they wouldn’t race unless the surface was repaved.”

Huth got bids that ranged from $90,000 for a complete repaving to $16,000 for a one-inch asphalt cap. He decided on the cap.

“It was a Friday and I asked Marion Wright, the man with the equipment, when he could start,” Huth said. “He said Tuesday. Well, I wasn’t too sure about that because I had only $14 in my pocket, but I decided to gamble and told him to come on out. Tuesday morning, when I got to the track, he had trucks lined up all the way to Rosamond Boulevard, and he did the whole job in three days.

“When he finished, he said for $3,000 more, he would pave a parking area. I told him to go ahead. Then I asked him about the payments. He said $2,000 a month and I said, ‘How about $200?’ and he said, ‘OK.’ From then on, we were in business.”

From 1965 to 1980, Huth leased the track to racing promoters and went to Montana, where he fished and hunted for a living.

“I’d moved around all my life, and in 1980 I decided it was time to settle down and stay in one place awhile,” he said. “The track was just the place to keep me busy. And I figured my background was the right one for the racing business. My mother had a cleaning business and when my dad died when I was 4, all the kids had to learn to hustle. Those were Depression days and you had to learn fast how to exist.

“I started a muffler shop with my high school auto shop instructor in Burbank. That led to working on fast cars, and when I was 17 I had a little ’29 roadster that I ran 93 m.p.h. on the dry lakes at Muroc. There were no drag strips then, and we used to race along Glen Oaks Boulevard and Riverside Drive in the valley.”

Fast cars can lead to fast businesses and Huth was eager. At 19, a year out of high school, he ran bootleg whiskey from Los Angeles to Idaho.

“When I saved up a little bankroll, I bought a roadhouse in Pocatello, Idaho, and learned the gambling business right there. After (World War II), I ran gambling establishments and nightclubs in Montana, Idaho, Georgia, Cuba, Mexico and Alaska.

“Gambling is a great business. The only inventory is cash and there are no books to keep. All you have to do is keep Uncle Sam happy by giving him a little money each year.

“The only time I got in trouble was in Cuba, where I got tossed in jail one night. It was a crazy time then. The revolution was on and the Cubans would fight in the streets all day and then they’d be drinking with each other in the bars that night. When morning came, it would be back to shooting at each other.”

Not much has changed around Willow Springs in the nearly 40 years since Harold Mathewson picked it as the site for a one-mile oval that he proposed to build. The old Tropico gold mine, built in 1904, sits on a hill overlooking the track, its buildings slowly decaying in the sun and wind.

The track is in Kern County, 16 miles north of Lancaster and six miles west on Rosamond Boulevard off the Antelope Valley Freeway. Rosamond High is new, but the Triple “R” Store, Villa Basque restaurant, Thunderbird Mobile Ranch and the Exotic Feline Breeding Compound look as though they were there in Mathewson’s day.

Before Mathewson got around to grading the property for his oval, Bill Pollack, then president of the Cal Club, and Ken Miles, a leading sports car driver, convinced him that the trend in racing was toward sports cars on road courses.

So instead of an oval, he built a 2 1/2-mile track along the same lines as it is today, uphill and down with sweeping curves and tight, off-camber corners. The only changes have been eliminating some dangerous berms alongside the course and repaving the surface.

Riverside Raceway long claimed to be the first track in the country to hold a professional sports car race, but that was 1958. Willow Springs had one on Sept. 25, 1955 under auspices of the United Racing Assn. The Bill White promotion had such Indy car drivers as Jimmy Bryan in a Maserati, Pat O’Connor in a Jaguar, Henry Banks in a Ferrari and Ray Crawford in a Kurtis-Lincoln.

Two NASCAR Grand National races, now known as Winston Cup, were held in 1956 and 1957. The first, a 200-mile event, was won by Chuck Stevenson in a Ford against mostly West Coast drivers. The following year, for a 150-mile Grand National, all the major factory teams were on hand, and Marvin Panch, in a Dodge, beat Fireball Roberts and Jim Paschal and a field that included Parnelli Jones, Mel Larson and Johnny Mantz.

Ken Clapp, now NASCAR vice president for western operations, was a 16-year-old crew member for the first race.

“We stayed in a $3-a-night motel in Lancaster, two to a room,” Clapp recalled. “It was a pretty exciting deal for a high school kid. I remember it was dusty. The pits were dirt and there weren’t any improvements. The oiled dirt dug up pretty badly, and there were a bunch of flipped cars.”

In the winter of 1957, White folded up and Willow Springs was taken over by the tumbleweeds until Huth gained control in 1962.

One of the first uses of Huth’s newly paved track in 1963 was by the Honda Formula One team, which had built its first V-12 and needed a test site. The car was flown from Japan to Los Angeles and trucked to Willow Springs, where Ronnie Bucknum drove it.

“The entire crew was Japanese, and Ronnie and I were the only ones who could speak English,” Huth recalled. “Everything was done with hand signals, shrugs and smiles.”

The test worked, however. Soon after, the Honda won the Mexico Grand Prix with Ritchie Ginter driving. It was one of only two races ever won by a Honda chassis, although the Honda engine has been dominant recently with Ayrton Senna and the McLaren chassis.

Nigel Mansell, in a Formula One Lotus, set a Willow Springs record of 1 minute 6.5 seconds in 1983 while testing for the Long Beach Grand Prix, but it has since been broken by Indy car drivers Michael Andretti and Al Unser Jr.

Andretti ran 1:06.3, or 136.3 m.p.h., in 1987, and Unser ran 1:06.2 the same year. Andretti also holds the track Formula Atlantic record of 1:14.3 set in 1983.

Other records include IMSA GTP, Rocky Moran in a Toyota, 1:08.7; Super Production, Les Lindley, 1:17.8 in a Camaro; and NASCAR Winston Cup, Derrike Cope, 1:26.3 in a Thunderbird.

Scott Gray broke Randy Mamola’s motorcycle record with a 1:26.1 lap in 1989. Wayne Rainey, the world road racing champion, holds the Superbike mark of 1:27.4. The fastest kart driver is Tom Kistler, who ran 1:21.6 in 1987 in a 250cc Superkart.

“I’ve owned this place for nearly 30 years, and I’ve watched the best drivers and riders in the world test some of the finest machinery ever designed,” Huth said. “During that time, I’ve seen the lap record drop from 1:33 to 1:06.2.

“My greatest wish for Willow is not to see thousands of spectators at an event here, but rather to watch and listen as someone shatters the almighty one-minute mark. Sometimes I feel like straightening out a corner to help, but then I know the record would be disqualified for modification.

“Sooner or later, the one-flat will happen, and I’ll be the happiest guy in the world.”