Backmarker: West Coast Flat Tracking

Anyone who’s followed AGV Backmarker over the last month or so remembers that those Honda flat trackers I wrote about got some of their first shakedowns out here on the West Coast. Flat tracking on the West Coast came up again a couple of weeks ago, when I chatted with Chris Carr about the future of AMA professional flat track racing.

I asked him how important it was to the series to get exposure in the big California market. “It’s been about seven years since we’ve had a West Coast round,” he told me, “but it’s not for lack of trying.” He went on to point out that to justify the travel expenses from the Midwest, where most flat track teams are based, there’d need to be more than a single round.

There used to be mile races in Seattle, Sacramento, San Jose, and Del Mar. I’d love to see a return to Del Mar since it’s just a few minutes from my house, but it’ll never happen. After a series of gruesome horse injuries, the track surface was changed to make it safer for the ponies, but useless to motorcycles.

But the most-missed venue isn’t just off the schedule; the track itself has been wiped off the map. From the late ’50s until 1990, Ascot Park was a half-mile joint in Gardena (a suburb just south of Los Angeles that’s less of an idyll than its name implies).

Ascot was often the final race of the AMA Grand National season, and it also hosted short-track and TT races in the infield, but it’s best remembered for the “half-mile” races they held there every Friday night from April-October; it was a self-proclaimed “West Coast Championship.”

Don Emde, who was a Daytona 200 winner—obviously no slouch himself on a motorcycle—told me, “There was so much competition there, winning a Friday night final in the Expert class was like winning a national somewhere else. On any given Friday night, unless we were all back east on the national series, Gene Romero would be there, Mert Lawwill, Keith Mashburn, David Aldana, Mark Brelsford…. There would be maybe fifty Expert riders there—even qualifying for the show was tough to do.”

Ascot only held 7,500 people, but the track’s promoter, J.C. Agajanian, advertised it heavily and it attracted a faithful crowd that could not be confused for church-goers. In 1965, smoke from the fires burning in the Watts riots drifted over the track. Through the ’70s, the pall came from the herb being burned right in the stands.

In addition to weekly bike races, Ascot hosted USAC (U.S. Auto Club) sprint-car racing. That was a problem; it had originally been built as a sprint-car track, with a huge catch fence to protect the spectators in the grandstand, and solid, dirt-backed walls made from heavy timber. Those walls didn’t have any give, and even if you lived through the initial impact, you’d bounce back onto the track and get run over.

Carr lives in Pennsylvania now, but he grew up in Northern California and did his early racing at the Lodi Cycle Bowl. As a kid, he talked his mom into taking him down to Ascot to watch the nationals there. Chris’ pro career started to take off in the last few years that Ascot was open, and he won there three times.

“I don’t know if you’d call it clay or dirt,” Chris told me. “They’d dump the dirt from graves they dug in the cemetery across the street. It had spark plugs from blown-up sprint cars in it, and rocks. Racing there was like wearing a bullet-proof vest and standing in a shooting range, and just letting them unload on you with semi-autos! Before we had hand guards, guys would cut up milk cartons and try to use them to protect their knuckles.”

It must’ve been a hell of a place to be a Novice, but my friend Dennis Kanegae survived it. He first raced there on a 250cc Kawasaki A1R proddie (road) racer fitted with wide bars. “It was a two-stroke, rotary-valve twin, that had been set up for a guy who got killed on it,” he told me. “The owner offered it to a few other guys who didn’t want to take it. I wanted to race there that bad, that I said, ‘I’m not superstitious, I’ll ride it.’”

The Kawi was a pretty blunt instrument for flat tracking; in that brakeless era, it lacked even such niceties as a kill switch or decompressor, which other riders used to slow down. But it was fast, and Kanegae used it to good effect until it finally seized and threw him down on the track. “I wasn’t run over,” he recalled, “but about five other bikes hit it and went down. It looked like a plane had crashed.”

When Kanegae graduated to the Junior ranks, he gave the Kawasaki to another new rider, and that guy died, too. Superstitious or not, that was one ride I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted. Later in his career, Dennis rode Triumphs, Nortons, and BSAs. He started racing at the end of the rigid-frames, and rode through the transition in Class C rules when overhead-valve bikes grew from 500 to 750cc.

Ascot’s location in the heart of SoCal’s burgeoning motorcycle industry brought together racers, sponsors, and builders. If you could prove yourself in front of that audience, you could make good money. One of the fast locals was Tom Horton (another rider who came up through the Novice and Junior ranks there). He picked up a Montesa sponsorship and made $800 a month in the mid-’70s. That’s the equivalent of $4,000 a month in today’s money, and that wasn’t even his main ride; he had a Yamaha B team sponsorship, and rode 750 twins built by the legendary Shell Thuett in the premier class. (Tom still owns a couple of motorcycle dealerships up around Palmdale and was RRX Editor CJ’s boss for a while. He proves my theory that if motorcycles don’t kill us, they keep us young.)

The deep fields, trick bikes, and industry money would have made the racing good at any track, but part of Ascot’s mystique grew out of its otherworldly surface. When I talked to Jeff Haney about it, he called it a “real fast West Coast cushion.” Carr used the same phrase, and I was curious how it might differ from cushion tracks in other places.

“Most of the cushion tracks back East are pea gravel, crushed limestone,” Carr explained. “When you get up in there, the rear wheel really spins, and it’s loose but comfortable. The cushion at Ascot had a lot of grip; it was almost like road racing. You were either hooked up and going forward, or you were really flailing. And as fast as it was, if you went down, you got hurt.”

They called Ascot a half-mile, but that was measured around the outside; it was really more like 4/10th of a mile. As tight as it was, racers who came from other regions were always shocked to find the locals running into the turns at 90 mph; even after brakes were permitted, they were barely touched at Ascot.

Horton recalled that they’d harrow the track at the beginning of each race day, so it started out as a cushion track. He added his own, well, harrowing tales of Ascot’s painful roost. “There were broken pieces of brick and concrete, connecting rods, all kinds of stuff in there. I used to put sheets of corrugated cardboard under my leathers to protect my chest. Once, a nail came through my visor and stuck me right between the eyes!”

By the end of the night, though, the bottom of the track was brushed off and smooth; the clay surface was so tacky that when you walked across it, the soles of your shoes stuck to it. It was very susceptible to slight changes in humidity and dew point however, and was prone to developing treacherous slippery spots. What you wanted to see was the flag hanging straight down—no moist wind off the ocean, no drying Santa Anas. Then at least it would be consistent.

With a grippy (but tricky) low line and a fast (but tricky) cushion, there were racing lines that worked for any riding style—as long as you had the ’nads for it. Although the competition was fierce, there was a shared respect amongst rivals. “Even today,” says Horton, “when I get together with other riders who raced at Ascot, we’re always glad to have someone to talk to about our experiences; if you weren’t there, it’s almost impossible to understand.” They’re like old soldiers who faced combat together.

Eventually though, Ascot fell victim to falling attendance and rising real-estate values. The old track and stands were bulldozed, and the lot was sold off for development. It turned out that it was built on an old landfill site, and lingering pollution concerns kept it vacant for years. Who knows what was seeping up out of the old dump, that made Ascot’s clay so tacky?