The two racers idled in their vehicles near the starting line, one behind the other, waiting for their last chance to blast down the drag strip at Irwindale Speedway.
They were bound by a love for speed — but that’s about all they had in common.
Craig Rayburn, 61, had competed in hundreds of events at the race track, and drove a 420-horsepower muscle car with a snarling V-8. Trevor Kirby, there for the first time, was strapped into a dragster with a one-cylinder motor that made about seven horsepower.
And he was 9.
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1.Veteran racer Craig Rayburn brought his powerful 1969 Mercury Cougar Eliminator to the final running of Thursday Night Thunder at Irwindale Speedway’s drag strip.(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)2.Trevor Kirby, 9, another participant in the Dec. 5 event, went down the strip in a dragster that made about seven horsepower.(Courtesy of Rose Kirby)
Their trips down the 1/8-mile strip were bleating and braying symphonies, one a torchbearer for Irwindale’s past, the other embodying drag racing’s promising — but uncertain — future in a region that was losing its last strip regularly open to amateurs.
Irwindale Speedway & Event Center, a fixture of the Southern California motorsports scene since 1999, is closing this month upon expiration of its lease. IDS Real Estate Group, owner of the 63-acre parcel where the facility is situated, intends to build a mixed-use commercial complex there.
The Speedway has hosted NASCAR races, demolition derbies and NHRA-sanctioned drag racing. But Thursday Night Thunder may be its signature offering. The event allowed anyone who knew the gas pedal from the brakes to test their mettle on the drag strip, drawing everyone from insurance adjusters to street racers and professional drivers. They’d show up in all manner of vehicles: muscle cars, motorcycles, purpose-built “rail jobs” — dragsters with exposed frame rails — and even stock Teslas.
In an era in which street racing has become increasingly dangerous, with high-speed accidents and raucous sideshows giving the scene an air of utter lawlessness, the Thursday night gatherings have offered a safer outlet. With Irwindale’s closure, the only drag racing facility in Los Angeles County will be the In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip, but it is rarely open to average Joes. Other options in the region require trips to the Bakersfield or San Diego areas.
That has Scott Graham worried. A former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, he co-founded a nonprofit community outreach program called LASD Motorsports, which aims to build positive relationships between law enforcement and racers. He was on hand for the final running of Thursday Night Thunder on Dec. 5, and stood beside his group’s black-and-white Chevrolet Camaro dragster as cars made their way down the nearby strip. Street racing, he said, is “similar to narcotics.”
“You can do all the enforcement you want — the end user is gonna get it no matter what,” Graham said. “So if you provide a [legal] outlet for them, it hurts the illegal part of it. Now, where … is anybody going to go?”
Plenty of gearheads wanted to get in one last (legal) pass on the drag strip, which opened in 2001, a few years after the the facility’s two ovals debuted on the site of a former gravel pit. Indeed, all 250 slots for racers sold out well before the final running. That, said Irwindale Speedway Vice President Will Kozak, “never happens.” He pegged attendance at about 5,000 — more than double the typical number of visitors. He said he sensed their wistfulness. It matched his own melancholy.
“It’s definitely our sentiment,” Kozak said. “From a competitor standpoint, it’s a lot of hugs and high-fives.”
Irwindale Speedway had long been seen as endangered when news broke in October that it would be shuttering. After all, Southland motorsports venues have been redevelopment targets for decades.
It hadn’t always been this way: there once were so many drag strips in the area that it was known as “Drag City.” During a golden age that roughly spanned from the 1950s to the ‘70s, tracks dotted the county, among them the San Fernando Raceway, Los Angeles County Raceway in Palmdale, Brotherhood Raceway Park on Terminal Island and Lions Drag Strip in Wilmington.
Over the years, the facilities were dogged by complaints over noise and traffic, and began shutting down in earnest in the ‘60s, even as the muscle car craze was fostering a new generation of speed freaks. Next, the soaring value of real estate and demand for industrial property led to additional closures, including Lions in 1972, Brotherhood Raceway in 1995 and the L.A. County Raceway in 2007.
Indeed, by the time Irwindale opened, it was already something of a throwback.
Standing in the grandstand overlooking the drag strip, Fabian Arroyo, a longtime member of the Brotherhood of Street Racers, extolled that bygone era — and lamented the loss of Irwindale.
“You’re gonna see a big uprising in street racing,” said Arroyo, 61, executive vice president of the Brotherhood.
Arroyo had brought his 18-year-old son, Owen. The pair watched the action for a while, and Arroyo would raise his voice over revving engines to offer his veteran racer’s insights.
When one driver’s 1/8-mile time failed to flash on a large electronic scoreboard, Arroyo explained that it was almost certainly on purpose. The man, Arroyo said, must have asked organizers not to display his time, because he didn’t want anyone to know how fast his car had ripped down the strip. “Because he’s gonna race for money,” Arroyo said. Likely on the streets.
Whenever a particularly audacious ride approached the starting line — like a 1975 Dodge Camper Van designed to look like a clapped-out ice cream truck — cell phones would whip into the air to record the drama.
The van may have gotten the biggest cheer of the night when it went down the strip blaring an ice cream truck song.
“The world’s fastest ice cream truck!” announcer Bob Beck said over the public-address system.
Conditions conspired to curtail some of the action on the two-lane strip. Because of moisture on the left lane — caused by a line of billboards that blocked airflow — organizers closed it after only about 20 minutes of racing, Beck said.
That meant that few racers got to, well, race each other.
But drag racers are always racing the clock, too, and the timing equipment still worked just fine. Before she called it a night due to the poor conditions, Kelly Anderson set a personal best in her 800-horsepower Camaro, doing the 1/8 mile in 5.70 seconds.
A former health coach, Anderson, 56, got hooked on drag racing five years ago, when she visited the track with her husband, watched the racing, and said, “I could totally give it a go.” She soon returned to the track — not as a spectator, but as a racer. She calls it “the day my life changed forever.”
For a half decade, she drag raced at Irwindale weekly. “Everybody helps everybody. It really is a community,” said Anderson, who two years ago founded Mavix Community Outreach, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of foster kids and troubled teens through motorsports. “It’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle.”
With only one lane open, the line of cars waiting to race lengthened dramatically. But few seemed to mind — including Dennis Croasmun, a former Irwindale Speedway employee. When he learned the track was closing, he said he called his ex-boss and asked if he could work one last Thursday Night Thunder.
That’s how he wound up directing traffic amid dozens of cars snaking past orange cones in a slow procession toward the starting line.
“I wanted to be part of the last one,” he said.
It was getting late, and Trevor Kirby, the 9-year-old racer, was snug in the cockpit of his junior dragster, preparing for his final sprint. He’d come to Irwindale needing to make six successful runs as part of his application for an NHRA Junior Drag Racing license. Earlier, with a handful of passes under his belt, Trevor said he’d had fun but hadn’t driven too fast.
“Two more runs and I’ll be licensed!” he said. “I’ll go 55 miles per hour — that’s as fast as the car goes.”
This was Trevor’s chance. His coach, Jacelyn Gonzaga, 17, a high school senior who drag races competitively, gave him some final words of encouragement: “Now that you’re comfortable with the car and see its potential, I want you to step on the gas. I’m proud of you!”
The light turned green and Trevor mashed the throttle, sending the dragster down the track. He crossed the finish line at about 52 miles per hour — 10 mph faster than his previous run.
After the pass, Trevor gave his mother a high-five and said he wanted to race all the time. Rose Kirby could only laugh. Years ago, she came to the Speedway with her father to watch a demolition derby. She was saddened by the closure — but mostly just proud of her son.
“He did a really good job listening — that was important to me. He was very safe, and he got better every time,” she said. “I don’t know what the future has for us, but we’re gonna follow this trail as long as we can and see what happens.”
Rayburn, the racer in his 60s, knows what it’s like to go down that road. A veteran stock car driver, he estimated he’d competed in hundreds of events at Irwindale — but had only gone down the drag strip a few times. He said he participated in the very first competition at Irwindale: A NASCAR Super Late Model race held on one of the ovals. The motor he used in that contest was now mounted in the 1969 Mercury Cougar Eliminator he brought out for Thursday Night Thunder.
Days after the event, Rayburn said that queuing up behind Trevor was a “full-circle” moment.
“I’m probably not racing a whole lot more in my life, and he’s just starting out,” he said.
But Rayburn wondered where young enthusiasts will go now.
Organizers called it a night at 10 p.m.
Inside a squat building near the starting line, Beck, the announcer, said he’d tried to keep his PA banter light. An announcer at the Speedway for the last 14 years, Beck developed some go-to jokes, like the the one about a certain Bavarian car brand: “You know, BMW, bring money with you.”
He always ended Thursday Night Thunder with the same sign-off: “This is your place to race.”
On this night, though, Beck changed things up.
“Rubber side down, shiny side up — thank you for coming out,” he said. “This has been your place to race.”
One of the last to leave the parking lot was Robert Roth, the driver of the ice cream van. Sitting at the steering wheel, he explained that his late father, Charles Roth, had bought the vehicle in 1975 and outfitted it to take their family camping across the country. “It has been in every state except Alaska and Hawaii,” said Roth, 59.
He’d been racing the Dodge at Irwindale since 2010, the year he turned it into a faux ice cream van. He’d recently put in a new V-8, and had just made one of his fastest passes ever, turning the 1/8 mile in 7.86 seconds. “I’m on my third engine,” he said.
Throughout the night, he relished the racers and spectators who approached him, some recalling how he’d passed out free ice cream to fans at Irwindale every August.
“A lot of these kids that are in their 20s now, they’d come up to me and go, ‘Man, I got ice cream from you as a kid.’ They remember it,” Roth said. “It’s the reason why I did it, because the next generation is the only way we can keep a racetrack. And now we are losing this one.”
Roth worried about younger racers taking to the streets, now more dangerous than ever “with these cars that have 800 horsepower.” And he wondered if another all-access drag strip would ever open in L.A. County.
Irwindale Speedway will just be a memory now, but a powerful one for many. Roth had been thinking of his father all night. Charles got a chance to see his son drag race the van there in 2012 just before he died.
As the last cars pulled out of the lot, Roth turned the ignition. The van roared. He gunned the throttle. And headed off into the night.