Victorville Fairgrounds

Saturday the van was loaded up and set out towards Victorville with a detour through Riverside and San Berdoo. The bike I bought had a stock Jawa muffler on it and to race at the City of Industry you need a special quiet one so my friend Steve Murray let me borrow one he wasn't using and we headed there to pick it up. With all the development in Riverside you don't have to go far off a main drag to hit the dirt roads and for a while the van thought we were headed to a desert race. Steve lives on a hill that has a great view of the surrounding area and to the north the area had been cleaned off to build a zillion of tract houses until the bubble burst and the hills remain smooth after the money fountain went dry. Then the trip went toward March Air force Base and a swing up to view the new track that is being build next to the Orange Show by racer promoter Shawn McConnell. The track site is behind the main Orange Show asphalt oval and is in the same spot where speedway was raced a few years ago on Wednesday night and is a true work in progress.

There was a car race going on at the Orange Show and the parking lot was filling up and later there was more car racing at the Victorville Fairgrounds plus the racing at Wheel to Wheel Raceway where the speedway races were.

As we drove through the area around the Orange Show (which is not in Orange County) we passed several closed car dealerships that were boarded up and covered with graffiti. On the road again we saw more evidence of racing as Glenn Helen Raceway was holding an outdoor motocross national and it looked like a real big crowd.

Getting from my house to Corona is a giant parking lot but after that the traffic was light considering it is a holiday weekend.

At Victorville there are two dirt race tracks at the fairgrounds, one is a larger oval track that runs modified stock car and the small track is a dirt oval that has a slight bank which runs a small sprint car that is powered my a Jawa motorcycle motor. John Aden at http://www.wheel2wheelraceway,com/ builds the race cars and has been promoting the small sprinter for several years. I spent more time sorting out the bike new to me and a loose coil wire in the first race made for noises that would normally be held on the Fourth of July. In the last race I did manage to get a little excited and lifted the front wheel at the start but didn't crash and finished fifth out of sixth.

Steve Evans (310-309-9418) does the promoting for the speedway motorcycles here and he also promotes races in Ridgecrest and Perris Raceway. The races started promply at six and alternated between the sprints and the speedway bikes. It is usually hot and windy here later in the year but last night it was just plain windy. To make the program more interesting a large water pipe broke in the pits and made the return to the pits a water adventure,

The main event was called the Eliminapolis where the riders race one lap and the last one is out until there are only two remaining riders and they race a final two laps for the cash. The final finish was very close and was between Jimmy Fishback (won $500.00) and Austin Novratil ($200.00).

This is a very good payout for the riders, something that some promoters of speedway can't say. Three cheers for Steve Evans and three cheers for Ryan Evans (not related) the fasted clip board in the west.