In Car No. 9, She’s 16 Trying to Go 70

Kristlyn Queener, a 16-year-old usually full of talk and smiles, sits quietly behind the wheel of a 1989 Nissan 240SX that her father has stripped down to basics. There’s one seat, a safety harness to hold her in place, no glass anywhere and a big, white number 9 on the side near a small sticker that reads “Caution: Blonde Thinking.”

In a few minutes Kristlyn, the youngest racer this season at Perris Auto Speedway, will be hitting nearly 70 mph on the bumpy half-mile dirt oval racetrack. The anticipation is tearing her up. While she is parked here in the pit, her shoulders are tense inside the red fire-resistant driver’s suit, her lips are squeezed tight, and worry has crept into eyes that stare blankly into the dusty whirlwind kicked up by the preceding race.

“I hate this part,” Kristlyn says softly to her father, Danny Queener, as he reaches around the window net to give her shoulder a quick, communicative rub. “I hate sitting here waiting.”

Queener hates this moment too, as well as the excruciating mix of emotions that will churn when Kristlyn roars out onto the track. Unspoken is the fear of what can go wrong, and flashbacks to the two bad crashes this year that meant quick rebuilds of the car but no injuries for Kristlyn.

“I’m just a mess the whole time,” says Queener, 48. “It’s the longest 10 minutes in my life.”

Queener himself is the son of a dirt track racer who moved from Iowa to Torrance in 1962 in part because he heard about the strange racing out here: cars speeding around a figure-eight track with an intersection in the middle, a format that is rarely used these days. Queener took up racing in the early 1970s, and for a time his wife, Dorine, 45, raced too.

Dorine dropped out first, then Queener reluctantly gave it up a few years back when his son, Jeremy, then in high school, was itching to race and there just wasn’t enough cash or driveway space to run two cars. Jeremy, 20, now a mechanic at a Torrance auto dealership, raced for a couple of seasons before his grades began slipping and Queener sold the car to get rid of the distraction. But last year Jeremy was back, driving a car borrowed from a friend, and won Perris’ “street stocks” championship. This year he’s on another friend’s pit crew and hopes to get his own car at some point.

Two years ago Kristlyn was ready to move up from go-karts at Route 66 Speedway’s three-eighths-mile dirt track in Victorville, and the Queeners jumped back into serious racing. Now Kristlyn, a junior at Narbonne High School, is the family’s designated racer, part of the third generation of Queeners to hurtle around dirt circles.

“When he [Jeremy] was old enough, it was his turn, and she got old enough, and now it’s her turn,” Queener says. “I’ll keep her going through graduation, as long as her grades stay up.”

A Roaring Pastime

Tracks like Perris’ -- and families like the Queeners -- are what’s left of Southern California dirt track racing, a pastime that once filled the night air with roars and exhaust fumes from Huntington Beach’s Legion Stadium to the Riverside Oval, from Culver City Stadium to Bonelli Ranch in Santa Clarita.

No more. Suburban sprawl, the escalating cost of maintaining cars and sweeping shifts in demographics have pushed local dirt tracks to the brink of extinction. From a high of 15 dirt tracks in the 1950s, the Los Angeles area now has only three, all on the far reaches of exurbia: Ventura Speedway, celebrating its 30th anniversary; Route 66 in Victorville; and here in Perris beneath the Lake Perris dam.

“It takes a lot of property,” says Motorsports Hall of Fame driver Parnelli Jones, who grew up in Torrance and raced the local circuit in the early years of a career that included winning the 1963 Indianapolis 500. “The only ones that seem to survive are the ones that race related to a fairgrounds, where it’s some kind of public facility.”

The collapse picked up speed in the 1990s, beginning with the closing of Gardena’s legendary Ascot Park, where Jones once raced, built atop a former garbage dump off Vermont Avenue and 189th Street. Seven more tracks closed over the next few years, said Allan Brown, co-editor of the National Speedway Directory.

Nationwide, dirt track racing is holding steady with 1,054 tracks, about the same as 50 years ago, while the number of paved tracks has grown, Brown says. NASCAR, with its celebrity drivers, corporate sponsorships and television contracts, has supplanted the old rural roots of dirt tracks with their mud-caked, stripped-down cars kicking up clods of earth and the occasional car part.

“There’s a down-homey kind of feel to dirt tracks,” says Harold Osmer of Chatsworth, who has written three books about California’s racing history. “Racing is a sensory experience. You get the sights and the sounds and feel the grandstand vibrate.”

But locally, when Ascot closed, “a lot of cars just ended up in backyards,” says Queener, one of the few Ascot drivers who kept racing dirt tracks by making regular treks to Bakersfield.

And with three tracks now drawing drivers from across the region, the culture has lost something intangible: the closeness of community.

“At Ascot, everybody knew everybody,” Queener says. “If somebody had a birthday party, you didn’t invite two or three guys from the racetrack; you invited the whole racetrack and there would be 70 people there.”

“Sprint” cars and more expensive classes of dirt racers, which get occasional cable television coverage, can draw 7,000 fans to Perris Auto Speedway, says Don Kazarian, whose family runs the facility. But on nights when local drivers like Kristlyn are behind the wheels of self-modified cars, turnout is sparse -- around 1,200, about 20% of capacity. Most are the drivers’ friends and relatives, and there are fewer and fewer kids.

Dirt tracks have their own caste system dictated by economics. Wealthy drivers or those with local sponsors can invest $30,000 for a car to compete in the top divisions. Kristlyn has no sponsors beyond her father, a nurseryman and former construction worker, and her mother, a hospital secretary. A friend with a body shop helps occasionally with big-equipment fixes -- one of Kristlyn’s wrecks this summer required straightening the car’s frame -- but for the most part Queener Racing is a do-it-yourself proposition.

They bought Kristlyn’s car two years ago for $850 and Queener took a torch to it, cutting away unnecessary weight, adding a roll cage for protection and welding the doors shut. Queener estimates that the family has $3,500 invested in the car. He learned the basics of maintaining the cars through other drivers and trial and error, and does nearly all the work under a blue awning in the driveway of the family’s modest home on a dead-end street in Torrance.

Kristlyn began racing go-karts at Victorville in 2001 and last year won the youth championship (ages 14 to 17). This season, the Queeners decided to have Kristlyn race at Perris -- a shorter drive -- and even though “sport compacts” is the track’s lowest rung, the competition was still much stiffer than she faced at Victorville. With two races to go this season, Kristlyn is ranked 12th among 36 registered drivers. But that has more to do with finishing races than leading them -- she has yet to place in the top three of a race.

It doesn’t bother her.

“They’re in it for the championships, and they want to try to move up [to NASCAR] and see how far they can get,” Kristlyn says. “I want to get somewhere too, but right now I’m just trying to have fun and get experience.”

‘Pass You Later’

The breaks aren’t falling Kristlyn’s way this night. In the first heat she finished fifth as car after car dropped out until only seven finished the race. It was her best showing this year. “For the first time I saw my number up on the board,” she says excitedly. But the engine has been running rough and it misses when she reaches high RPMs, which means she gets little sprint power at high speeds -- just when she needs it to pass.

Queener tinkers under the hood trying to get the setup right on a newly installed rev regulator, required by track rules to limit the power of the engines. Friends stop by. The pit has the feel of a staff picnic at a highly competitive company.

The driver on one side of the Queeners has won the main event in the “street stock” division and is glowing with pride. Two spaces down on the other side are John and Linda Denver, a husband-and-wife racing team from Sun City with whom the Queeners have competed for years, and who are in Kristlyn’s division. Another sport compact driver, Kris Carnish, 24, in car No. 26, makes several visits, teasing Kristlyn and sharing track gossip before leaving with a smiled “Pass you later.”

But now it’s race time, and Kristlyn gets serious. After the impromptu shoulder rub from her father, she backs the car up then slowly moves through the pit to the staging area for the sport compacts’ 20-lap main event. She’s slotted for the front row, her first time starting there this season, and she’s nervous. When you start up front, the serious competitors have to go around you, and they often do not pass gently. So Kristlyn, who measures victory by finishing races, adopts an understated strategy: Just get out of everybody’s way.

The race starts with 13 cars rolling out onto the track in a thunderous roar. They make a couple of circuits as a group before the race starter decides all is set and drops the green flag. Kristlyn almost immediately gets passed. And passed again. She holds to a central line and barrels ahead but still they whiz by. She falls back.

In the third lap a strut on the right front wheel gives out and the car becomes tough to handle. She hangs on, fighting the car as it bumps around the track. The sound is electrifying, and deafening, as banged-up blue and red and green cars hurtle past Kristlyn until, at the midway point, she’s in 10th place.

“Come on, come on,” Queener says from the edge of the track, his frustration welling up. “It kills me sometimes not to be in the car. Sometimes I wish there was two seats in there.”

Kristlyn, once again, is moving up through attrition. The Denvers have already been forced out with car trouble. Karnish’s car has given up too, and he limps into the pit. Out on the track the driver of No. 53 passes Kristlyn in the 11th lap but she’s finally had enough of that. She stays tight on his back fender trying to find a slot to slide past but can’t make it happen. They stay close for a few more laps and Kristlyn keeps trying until finally, in the 17th lap, she finds space and pulls out ahead.

They finish that way, Kristlyn in seventh place, next to last among the cars that finished but at least “I’m going home with the car on the trailer.”

Queener dives back under the hood as his wife and daughter walk off across the pit, sharing a private moment on the way to the concrete-block food stand, all the race stress fading away now in the night air. For this week, anyway.

*

scott.martelle@latimes.com

*

A video of Kristlyn Queener in her 1989 Nissan 240SX is available at www.latimes.com/dirt