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A few Pix of the Falcon as it sits now
Some Pix of Motor Componets
Pix of the Long Beach Hi Po Swap Meet
Decoding the Ford small block
Info on timing a Ford Small Block
Pix of some dream cars
Some of My Pix of Southern Calif. racing in the old days !!
Welcome to the Falcon Webpage
Some memories I recently dredged up from deep down in an old box. Every ticket you see here, except for the Winternationals tickets, are from tracks long gone from Southern California.
They all represent great memories of a time when even the big boys raced, not for big coporate money, but for the pure joy of speed and competition. You gained your advantage, not by readouts from data aquisition, super computers and teams of engineers, but from spending hours tinkering in your shop.
When I was 18 or 19 I lived for the weekend, because I could find some kind of race going on somewhere, and the smell of Nitromethane and burning rubber was my drug of choice.
As far as motor sports goes, it was a great time to be alive.
Riverside Raceway, 2.7 miles of twisting turning road course for the Nascar boys, but they could reconfigure the track for trans am, can am, motorcycles, gocarts, drag racing, you name it.
They would anounce the green flag over the PA, and you'd feel the ground start to shake. 33 fire breathing monsters, with their 426 hemi's and 427's coming into the S-turns, jockying frantically for position, because there was barely enough room for two abreast on that section of the track. Already pushing 100 MPH not even 100 yards from the starting line. It was a religious experience for me.
Pomona California, this is where drag racing went main stream. This is the first NHRA sanctioned drag strip. Simply stated, this is where drag racing as we know it today was born.
The Winternationals, they use to call it the big go West. I think my Dad took me the first time in 1964.
Even though it doesn't get that cold in So Cal. I can remember sitting there shivering, with my ass frozen to those benches at 5:00 in the morning, just to make sure I got a good seat.
The legendary Lions Drag Strip, better known to the locals as "The Beach" Cool moist dense air from the ocean,  made it a favorite among the racers. Stuck in the middle of an Industrial area right next door to the docks in Long Beach. It was crude and rough around the edges, but that was part of it's charm.
CJ Pappy Hart with that honda 50 and his big cigar keeping an eye on things,“Big Daddy” Don Garlits, Mike Sniveley, Connie “The Bounty Hunter” Kalitta, Pete Robinson, Don “The Snake” Prudhomme, Eddie Schartman, Dyno Don Nicholson, Gas Ronda, Jungle Jim Liberman, everybody that was anybody at that time raced Lions. The first Floppers (flip up body funny cars), rumors of the experiments with Hydrazine for fuel. It was the place to be.
Irwindale, "The Rockpile" Another one of So Cals happening places if you loved drag racing. I remember the snack shack sat no more than a few feet from the starting line, people would buy beer, set it on the counter, then turn around to watch a Funny Car run only to have it vibrate their beer off the counter. They had the best fast food burgers anywhere!, and I just recently found out why, the guy that ran the concession stand, and owned part of the drag strip, was none other than the man who founded IN & OUT BURGER !
Many Many Saturday nights spent at this place.
The Miller brewery took over the property where the strip was, and because of that I still have trouble drinking Miller Beer.
OCIR ... the "Super Track" This baby was state of the art. I still remember going to the PDA Fuel Championships, and the summer Funny Car meets that would draw in one meet on one day, well over 50 AA/F dragsters, and something like 55 Funny Cars, nearly every racer in existance would show up.
In those days instead of having contests to see who could get the most sponser decals on their car, they had contests for who had the most beautiful paint job and lettering. Some of the Candy Apple paint jobs looked like they had 2 inches of clear on them, all hand done gold leaf lettering.  I remember just standing there with my mouth hanging open, in awe of the incredible paint jobs.
In the later years, they had the "Fox Hunts" where they let the girls in free, (more girls, draws more guys), simple marketing right? Trouble is, it got a little out of hand a couple of times (few to many beers in the crowd) riots insued. I was at one where I remember some girl running across the strip past the finish line, just before a funny car start. She didn't see the barbed wire fence on the other side, OUCH. Then the sheriffs and the K9's showed up, then the idiots set fire to the concession stand, then some guy got hit in the head with a flying beer bottle,(he died the next day), needless to say that was the end of the fox hunts.
Fantastic race track by any measure, and the last full 1/4 mile strip in the area for a long time.
I don't even know where this one came from ??? Memory is fading fast !!
I also have some souviners from Ontario Motor Speedway that i'll try to post later. A bunch of buildings now sit where it once was. It was just down the road from where California Speedway sits today.
I remember going to the 1975 NHRA World Finals there, they held them on Pit road.  Almost every class set a national record for speed, or ET, or both that day.  They raced open wheeled cars (USAC) and NASCAR there. It was the most beautiful speedway you've ever seen.  It was a 2.5 mile oval, that had luxury suites, a Trauma center in the infield, the most comfortable seating of any track or stadium I've ever been to. It had seating for 140,000, 85,000 of which was permenent seating. It had parking for 45,500 vehicles on 300 acres. You could fit 2 Disneylands in the infield, it had it all. Even though it's long gone, I still believe it was the greatest super speedway ever built.