MOTOR SPORTS: Oldest drag strip marches on

Some days it’s hard to get on track. The weekend of March 31-April 1, however, brought events back to normal for the folks at the graybeard-of-all-graybeards drag strip.

High winds bellowed and blew, rain blasted down, until, finally, the host Dust Devils Auto Club had to cancel its February drag racing calendar at the fabled track in Inyokern, Calif., after officials’ rush-through efforts failed. The next racing weekend, March 3-4, also went badly. The track and adjacent airport locale was borrowed on short notice by a film crew from Hollywood.

The Dust Devils forged the birth of one of the nation’s historic racetracks, remote and tiny, in September 1954, and did manage to launch its 2001 season opener January 20-21. The club participates in the Summit ET Racing Series and will hold a makeup points-race for that circuit June 2-3.

Situated about 100 miles east-northeast of the county seat in Bakersfield, the track sits along the Inyokern Airport and is surrounded by four mountain ranges in the Indian Wells Valley desert region. Inyokern has a population of around 1,000. Residents are mostly employed in nearby Ridgecrest or have civilian jobs at the bordering China Lake naval base.

The National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) has referred to the track as the “world’s oldest continuously operated drag strip.” A surprising 140 entries showed up for the very first races, the aftermath of which left the locals reeling when a contingent from Bakersfield ran roughshod over the Inyokern club’s inspired but outmatched bunch.

That was not about to discourage the club. After all, this was a small group that had to work, scrounge, and beg for equipment to even get started. One of the early promoters was Bernie Partridge, who later was to serve as a higher-up with the NHRA. Much of the encouragement came from area law officials who wanted an end to illegal racing on public roads. A track was located, thanks to a sweet abandonment by the U.S. Navy years before, and a move was made in 1953 to join the fledgling NHRA.

Two donated feed scales, needed to weigh cars, were buried in the sand, and the names of paid advertisers were written on car hubcaps. It wasn’t long before Dust Devils team members were claiming national records and becoming one of the most visible and best clubs in the country. They even allowed women drivers when the notion was mostly shunned elsewhere. Legendary driver Eddie Hill turned pro at the track in 1959.

After some members witnessed the use of a “Christmas tree” – a device, using a series of lights, to start cars on a ¼ mile drag run – at some 1963 races in Indianapolis, the contraption became the next on an items-to-have list. No track in California had one. The following year, the Dust Devils offered to stage a major race being held in southern California for an asking fee of – you guessed it – one Christmas tree, which they gladly received, and later loaned to tracks far and wide when it didn’t interfere with their own operations.

People who love the sport keep coming back, despite the distance for many, heat, sand, and its, well, its littleness. There’s an aura about the place, a special lie of the land, but in the final analysis, it’s the Dust Devils’ hospitality that apparently fosters such devotion to this particular strip of asphalt in the desert.

“The first time I went to Inyokern was for a car show and drag race back in 1962,” said Bruce Schwartz. “I went back in 1990 and it really had not changed at all. The people there are great and very accommodating to the racers. They treat everyone very well, so I kept coming back”

Schwartz liked it so well that he became the track announcer at Inyokern. He makes the three-hour drive regularly from his home in Torrance. The February weather problem, and Vin Diesel’s latest movie snafu in March, had kept him idle, a situation not experienced often by those associated with the long-running drag strip.

“February is typically a bad month for weather in this part of the desert. Periodically, there are winds that they call dust devils that come through. We just wait a few seconds and then resume racing.”