Too good to last: Carlsbad Raceway

Carlsbad Raceway, the little drag strip by the sea

Too good to last: Carlsbad Raceway
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Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

September, 2007 - Jim Donnelly

If the breeze cleared the haze of rubber smoke and nitromethane fumes just long enough for you to gulp a few fresh lungsful, you could smell the brine. San Diego may have ridden the caboose when it came to the legendary Southern California drag locales, but its home track was among the most picturesque and vibrant during its too-truncated existence. Carlsbad Raceway was almost within sight of the Pacific, squeezed in between a couple of the chaparral-dotted brown hills that roll along about 30 miles north of San Diego.

Carlsbad opened on 143 acres in 1963 and, for almost all of its lifespan, was a wonderfully basic track without a whole lot of amenities, especially compared with other regional tracks like Pomona and Ontario. This was, however, Southern California, which meant that if a straight shot of broad asphalt existed, it would invariably find itself getting turned tacky and hot by the hides of fuel-burning drag cars, especially Funny Cars. That's what was happening when photojournalist Ron Lewis, clutching his 35mm camera and winder, first found his way there from his home in San Diego, and stayed to record the great Funny Car wars at the end of the Sixties.

"Carlsbad, was, after Orange County International Raceway, probably equal to the best of the Southern California tracks in terms of stature," Lewis recalled. "The weather conditions there were always really, really good because the track was located so close to the ocean, the track ran downhill, and I remember there was a really serious dip in the left-hand lane right near the finish line. I first went in 1965, the first track I had ever attended."

Look at an atlas today and you'll find a narrow strip of urbanization yellow running along the Pacific coast from San Diego all the way up to Los Angeles. That was what ultimately silenced Carlsbad for good. The owners eventually added a motocross track and, beginning in 1976, what may have been the first skate park ever built in the United States. But the unstoppable wave of residential and business development along the coast treated the track like a python throttling the life from a field mouse. Despite backers' pleas for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's intercession, Carlsbad closed for good in 2004. No sign of the strip exists on the site today, which now hosts an industrial park.

"Frankly, it amazes me that Carlsbad lasted as long as it did," Lewis said wistfully.

" 'Flash' Gordon Mineo just died last year. He was involved in a boating accident. He was an independent out of Southern California and a longtime match racer who always ran Pontiacs, with a Firebird body here at Carlsbad. Earlier in the 1960s, he'd run a Funny Car with a supercharged Pontiac engine, but by this time, I'm pretty sure he'd switched over to a Hemi like most everyone else. Gordon has just pulled the chute in the lights here, and you can see the drogue starting to deploy. There's not a whole lot of tire distortion visible here, because they didn't have the downforce, and you didn't start to see really drastic changes in the tires at speed until they started running 250 mph or so some years later. "

" Pete Seaton should be driving here in the Super Shaker, which was owned or sponsored by Terry Hedrick at this time, which should be either 1968 or 1969, because it had Chevy Nova fiberglass. This was always one of my favorites because it was all Chevy, a real rat-motor car. Seaton was out of the Midwest someplace. This was a touring pro team, but I remember that they were more of a middle-of-the-pack crew than a top-tier operation. The Shaker used to have a Corvair body, with Seaton driving. I remember that the other famous Corvair-bodied car, owned by Doug Thorley, was one of the real dominant Funny Cars back in 1967 and 1968, more so than the Shaker was. "

" Rambunctious, owned and driven by Gene Snow out of Texas, was a hugely famous Funny Car during that era. Snow is still around, and back then, he was one of the very top Funny Car drivers around, usually using a Chrysler body like this Dodge Charger. It was definitely one of the top cars in the late 1960s, with a supercharged nitro Hemi from Keith Black, and Snow was the very first guy to run a Funny Car over 200 mph. Around the same time, he was the first guy to use a centrifugal-type clutch with direct drive in a fuel car, and later, during the 1980s and 1990s, made more advances with the clutch and driveline while he was running in Top Fuel. Snow was an innovator, if nothing else. "

" Well, what can I tell you? This is Bob Pickett. He was an independent Funny Car guy from Southern California, and he ran this AMC Javelin at a lot of the West Coast events back then. He was never, I'd say, a threat to win, but the Javelin was definitely a novelty and a big crowd pleaser. It was very unusual to see an American Motors product racing at this level in any form. I remember back when Hayden Proffitt ran a Rambler Rebel Funny Car that actually had a blown AMC fuel engine in it. Pickett's car probably had one of the Hemis that were becoming commonplace around that time. If you look at the body, its contours are pretty much stock except for the stretched front end. My guess is, he didn't have to do the stretch stuff like the others did, probably because whoever built the body probably made the mold using stock Javelin sheetmetal panels. "

" I'd just gotten back from Englishtown, and Don Schumacher hired me to do the photography for all his NHRA teams there. Don is still a really busy guy. Back here, in about 1968, he was running his own Funny Car with a Plymouth Barracuda fastback body in one of the big meets at Carlsbad. Apparently, whenever you buy a battery charger today, he gets a percentage of it, and that's how Don made his fortune--Schumacher Electric in Chicago. Not just for cars, but heavy industrial stuff, too. As a racer, Don was real, real good. For a year or two back then, he won a lot of the really big drag races. Back when this Barracuda was running, a good pass for a Funny Car was in the low sevens at right around 200 mph. "

" Danny Ongais is here in 1969 just completing a burnout in Mickey Thompson's Mustang Mach 1. I believe that this car should have had a Ford 427 cammer in it at the time. Danny was a really good guy, very soft-spoken, an excellent driver, and we were very good friends. He was from Hawaii and then came to the West Coast, where he started driving the Mangler dragster in Top Fuel around 1965, then switched to Funny Cars with Thompson and drove the Vel's Parnelli Jones Funny Car before moving on to sports cars and Indy cars. See that hill in the background? It was just a slope behind the track where people took spots to sit down and watch. It was a great viewing spot. They'd start the cars 20 or 30 feet below you and do the burnout right there. "

" Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Carlsbad hosted some really big races, and always managed to pull the big national touring teams to them. This, in about 1969 or 1970, is the famed Chi-Town Hustler, wearing a Dodge Charger body, of the Farkonas, Coil and Minick team. Pat Minick would have been driving the car at this point. During those years, along with Prudhomme and McEwen, these guys ran absolutely everywhere in the country. With their huge, long, smoky burnouts, they were probably the single most popular Funny Car team going. Nobody in Funny Cars was really big back then in terms of either money or sponsorship. I remember that the Hustler team used to bring their car to the track on the back of a flatbed truck, but these were your big touring pros at the time, and they were certainly one of the biggest draws. "


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