When NASCAR kicked off the 2022 season with the Busch Light Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, it reconnected a long line of auto-racing history to one of the most fabled sporting venues in the United States.
Home of the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games, the Coliseum has hosted NFL and college football, Major League Baseball and numerous other sporting events through the years. NASCAR made its debut in the historic venue racing on a temporary quarter-mile track last February.
Long before the Coliseum was constructed, the site was an agricultural park that had a horse racing track. An auto race was held on the horse track in 1903 as part of the Fiesta Week Celebration.
Southern California would later become a hotbed for hot rods and racing, including races in the 1930s at Gilmore Stadium and Moto, Loyola and Atlantic Speedways.
Auto racing returned to the Coliseum after World War II, with the United Racing Ass’n midgets the primary division running from 1945 through ’48.
Ken Clapp, NASCAR’s retired senior vice president of western operations who is now chairman and CEO of the West Coast Stock Car Motorsports Hall of Fame, discussed the WRA events.
“The United Racing Ass’n was one of the biggest midget racing sanctioning bodies in America and ran there practically every week,” Clapp told SPEED SPORT. “They would start in April and ran until football season started in mid- to late-September. It was a very popular venue.
“They drew pretty stout crowds, around 40,000 a week. Culver City, Gardena and Gilmore Stadium drew good crowds every week. I can remember seeing pictures of the L.A. Coliseum and there were an honest 40,000 to 45,000 people there.”
Racing inside of a football stadium may be rare in the 2020s, but it’s really not new.
Stadiums such as Soldier Field in Chicago hosted auto racing during the 1940s and ’50s. In the South, NASCAR had events at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, N.C., a football stadium that continues to host weekly racing during the summer months.
Motorcycle racing and the Mickey Thompson Off-Road Stadium Series invaded the L.A. Coliseum during the 1970s and ’80s.
Tom Blattler has been involved in motorsports public relations for nearly 50 years. The Murrieta, Calif., native recalled when motorcycle racing was popular at the Coliseum in the early 1970s.
“In 1972, a promoter named Mike Goodwin, a rock promoter, established the Super Bowl of Motocross at the L.A. Coliseum,” Blattler told SPEED SPORT. “He brought dirt in and they jumped off the peristyle. A 16-year-old from San Diego named Marty Tripes won. They ended up getting 65,000 fans, and after that they ran at the Coliseum through the 1990s.
“Mickey Thompson used to have the Off-Road World Championships at Riverside Raceway and then Mickey brought them into the L.A. Coliseum in the late 1970s. Two guys named Rick and Roger Mears raced there before they got involved in Indy car racing.”
Goodwin was later convicted of killing Mickey Thompson and his wife, Trudy, outside of their home in California’s San Gabriel Mountains in 1988.
That aside, Blattler recalled the atmosphere of those events was vibrant because motorcycle racing was becoming very popular in Southern California. By bringing motocross into the major sports stadiums, it created an electric atmosphere.
The World Speedway Motorcycles competed at the L.A. Coliseum in 1982. Bruce Penhall won back-to-back championships.
Long before he became a four-time Indianapolis 500 winning driver, Rick Mears was an off-road racing star. He competed in the first Mickey Thompson show at the L.A. Coliseum in 1979 just a few months after he won his first Indianapolis 500 driving for Team Penske.
“It was right at the end of my off-road days,” Mears told SPEED SPORT. “I had just gotten started in the Indy car stuff and I ran the first two races he had. The first one, I won in open class, single-seat and ran again the next year at the end of my off-road days.
“They had really big crowds for that. It was really the start of that kind of stuff with the big stadiums. We were doing short-course racing at Riverside, closed course compared to the desert course. That started to catch on and then he came up with the stadium deal.
“The first two races; I won the first one and Roger finished second and the next year, Roger won it and I was second.”