CUP: Origins Part 2 - The LA Connection

Sprint Cup

CUP: Origins Part 2 - The LA Connection

With longtime promoter William Hickman Pickens at the helm, the city of Los Angeles launched organized stock-car racing in a big way...

Jonathan Ingram | http://www.RacinToday.com | Posted May 11, 2010 Charlotte, NC

Bill France Jr. (Left) and Bill France Sr. (Far Right) flank a contractor to discuss the soon-to-be-built Daytona International Speedway. Long before the speedway was built, stock-car racing already had a foothold in Los Angeles. (Photo: NASCAR)

Prior to the first outbreak of stock car racing in the 1930s, America’s driving heroes raced open-wheeled cars built specifically for the 500-mile contest in Indianapolis. One such hero was Frank Lockhart, who won the Indy 500 at age 23 in his first attempt with an innovative, daring and risky driving style that emphasized charging into the corners. Continuing to win races and break records across the country during the Roaring Twenties, including three victories on a board track in Charlotte in 1926 and 1927, the name recognition for Lockhart ranked with baseball’s Babe Ruth or boxer Jack Dempsey.

Outside of Indianapolis and its early nexus of car manufacturing, the primary hotbeds of Indy car racing were Los Angeles and New York. The L.A. region was home to the board tracks in Beverly Hills and later Culver City as well as road races in Santa Monica. New York City hosted major events on the board track in Brooklyn at Sheepshead Bay and others on Long Island.

Lockhart, a self-taught mechanical mastermind, was born in California and had begun his career by building an open-wheel Indy car from the running gear of a Model T in borrowed space at a shop in Hollywood as a teenager.

Although cars like the Model T and Model A Ford were raced on occasion, racing production cars in the same manner as Indy cars, often known as “Big Cars,” was an idea that arrived out of necessity at a location not far from that Hollywood garage where Lockhart began. With longtime promoter William Hickman Pickens at the helm, the city of Los Angeles launched organized stock car racing in a big way at Mines Field in 1934, a time when the Great Depression’s early days had crippled the AAA’s National Championship circuit for Indy cars, reducing it to four races and only one in Los Angeles.

“A new era in the enthralling history of automobile history,” was how the race day coverage in the L.A. Times summed up this new racing event for production cars, using history twice in the same sentence as a way to emphasize the landmark nature of the event. “After four hours of chilling speed, breath-taking daring and courageous endurance, which will of necessity be shown by the winning driver, the 50,000 fans who are expected to line the well-oiled surface will have been shown to their own satisfaction just how well their own little runabouts compares with the other various makes of light cars on the road.”

In a foreshadowing of NASCAR’s first Strictly Stock race 15 years later in Charlotte, the article further stated, “The race is strictly on a stock-car basis.”

The race was part of the Gilmore Gold Cup series, sponsored by the Gilmore Oil Co., making it part of the first major professional series for stock cars. The four-race series had begun in Elgin, Ill. under AAA sanction near Chicago in August of 1933 on a road course, using the concept of strictly stock equipment, although bumpers, fenders, headlights and windshields could be removed. The AAA was in charge of verifying the drive train was entirely stock on the cars, the majority being Ford Roadsters equiped with the flathead V-8.

Auto Club Speedway, located in the Los Angeles suburb of Fontana, will lose its Chase race next year. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Near what is now the L.A. International Airport, the second race of the Gilmore Gold Cup series was run at a B-shaped course on property leased from the city of Los Angeles in February of 1934. The first race at Mines Field drew a crowd said to be bigger than those at the popular air races and was estimated at 75,000 by the Times. Even if that estimate carried some hot air, plenty of fans lined the fences of the long front straight of the two-mile track, many in their own vehicles as well as in the grandstands.

The Gilmore Gold Cup, one of many promotions engaged by second generation oil man Earl Gilmore of Los Angeles, proved that a field of production cars, especially the Ford Roadsters equipped with the company’s relatively new flathead V-8 engine, would create an ample number of entries, compelling speeds and a good crowd. In Los Angeles, one participant’s death during practice early in the week probably helped pre-race publicity and the turnout as well. Also, the entries were lined up in a parade on Broadway in downtown L.A. to promote the race.

Even allowing for the purple prose of the time, fans saw an outstanding event where local heroes “Stubby” Stubblefield and Al Gordon, trying to maintain his 16-race winning streak established at tracks in the L.A. area, fought it out in the closing stages. “And so it went,” reported the Times under the byline of Bill Potts, “Gordon taking unbelievable chances and making up time in the dangerous east curve and Stubblefield gaining it back on the straight-aways. …Gordon kept the entire assemblage in a state of breathless suspense with his wild antics to no avail.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Ingram

RacinToday.com

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