Hey NASCAR fans, turns out racers were lapping at the historic sports venue as early as 1903.
This weekend the L.A. Coliseum will host a real, live NASCAR race on a paved oval laid over a surface that has seen two Olympics and countless USC, L.A. Raiders, L.A. Rams and even Los Angeles Dodgers games.
It seems like a novel idea—paving the infield track where it takes a full four laps to make a mile—but the Coliseum has been used for automobile races many times before, going all the way back to the turn of the last century. That was before the Coliseum was built, when the whole area was an agricultural exposition park and the only race track was for horses.
So the first races there were on a horse track.
To find out about the history of this institution, Autoweek contacted a real historian, Harold Osmer, who has spent most of his life researching and writing about race tracks in Southern California. There were a lot of them. So many that Osmer wrote his Master’s Thesis on the topic, and followed that up with three books on the subject.
Autoweek: When was the first race either in or around the Coliseum?
Harold Osmer: That would be more around the Coliseum, because that was when it was all known as Agricultural Park. The track was actually a horse track, and at that time it was one mile. That was 1903. The auto race was just more of an exhibition for the Fiesta Week Celebration, which was the county fair of its day.
AW: What were the cars and what was the dirt track like?
HO: They were pretty much just touring cars, a few of them were stripped down for racing. It wasn’t a full-on race with 10 guys on the track all vying for position and points and prize money and that sort of thing. It was more of an exhibition than anything. But they did put the cars on the track side-by-side, and then offered a prize for whoever finished first.
Bob Pankratz (black jacket) relaxing on the 20 yard line. Pankratz was a driver and car builder. His son and granddaughter continue the three-generation race family fever.
Osmer Archives
AW: Do you happen to know what the prize was?
HO: I’m sure it was just bragging rights more than anything. It was almost a sideshow. They had other exhibitions where they built ramps and things that cars could go up and the over, big wooden ramps just as a demonstration. It was an agricultural fair. The Fiesta week celebration, which was a week-long celebration, had been going on for 15 years by that time. So this was just the first time that they put cars on a track and called it an automotive meet. And we’re gonna call that the first official race in Southern California
Waldemer Hansen before his big crash in L.A.
Osmer Archives
AW: So in 1903, what would the cars have been? Anything we’d know?
HO: They did have a one guy in a White Steamer Phaeton who went over, he actually crashed his car. The LA Times said, “Previous to this, nothing startling had happened in the afternoon’s sport, and nothing could have happened after to surprise anyone.”
AW: Then after that 1903 race what came next?
HO: No, that was the only time at the Coliseum for a while. The cars moved over to another place called Ascot (one of four race tracks in SoCal called Ascot). Both the cars and the horses moved. The next races at the Coliseum took place in 1945.
AW: Were those the midgets?
HO: Those were the midgets. A promoter named Bill White put that on. Midgets had been going on in the 1930s at places like Gilmore Stadium, Atlantic Speedway, Moto Speedway, Loyola, so there weren’t a fair amount of other racetracks going on.
But during WWII everything shut down because of fuel and rubber conservation for the war effort. Plus, a lot of people were just gone, you know, the drivers and others were all taking part in the war effort. So as the as the war wound down, promoter Bill White decided, “Hey, let me get back to promoting races!” He approached the Coliseum, he had a friend on the Coliseum commission, and he said, “Hey, I want to do this because we have a readymade venue.” And they came in and paved a quarter-mile track right on the athletic track. It was flat, and they had pits on the inside. And they ran midgets. They formed United Racing Association, URA, for the midgets, and they ran in 1945.
The NASCAR Cup Series is racing at the L.A. Coliseum, but it’s not the first time race cars turned laps at the facilty.
Osmet Archives
AW: You sent me a picture of that. And from the angle that picture’s taken the track looks huge. But I guess it’s really not. If you’re running midgets, a quarter mile was a standard size.
HO: That was the benefit of midgets was that it brought auto racing to the masses. They weren’t huge cars, because prior to this, you had to go to a big Speedway, or you had to travel out to the boonies to find where the races were. You could put it at your local high school track or your local college athletic track because the grandstands were already there.
Then the athletic season came in and that’s what disrupted the auto racing. That’s why they didn’t go all year-round. It’s a multi-purpose venue.
They ran two races in ’45 and they averaged 36,000 people for the two events.
AW: That’s a pretty good crowd. Of course, the Coliseum holds 90,000 or something. But still, that’s pretty good. And at the time, there was no Internet, no TV, there was not even an autoweek.com. Back then there was really nothing. So people didn’t have as much to, to to distract them.
After that race in 1945 how often was the Coliseum used for auto racing?
1957 Indianapolis 500 Champion Sam Hanks, winningest driver at Los Angeles Coliseum with 6 victories out of the 32 total midgets racing events held between 1945 and 1948.
Osmer Archives
HO: Well, in 1946, they ran 15 events. And part of what they did was, the guys that raced were the same guys who raced at Indy. They were running midgets here, but they would go to the Midwest and they would run circuits back there. But by 1947 motorsports politics got in the way. They were so successful here in the Coliseum, and people were making so much money, because they guaranteed the drivers 40% of the gate.
They were making so much money that all the Midwest drivers started coming out here. And that really bothered AAA, the Automobile Association of America which was the big sanctioning body for races before the war. AAA was big in the Midwest, but they didn’t have their biggest stronghold out on the West Coast. Well, what happened was the guys that were running midgets that had aspirations to go to Indy were told by AAA, “If you race in the Coliseum, we will consider you an outlaw. And outlaws are not allowed at Indy.”
So the top names, Sam Hanks and those guys, they wanted to run Indy. As a result they were not allowed to race out here. And so then AAA came in, or the URA stepped aside and a AAA come in, and they messed everything up. And so they only ran five races in ‘47, after AAA took over. And they only ran nine races in 1948. Attendance was dropping off. A big part of that was because AAA had taken over and they didn’t provide this bigger purse. But there were other things that took place, too, people were finding more things to do. Midget racing wasn’t the only game in town anymore.
AW: So they mismanaged it into the ground?
HO: I think so. And then after ‘48, they just stopped racing in the Coliseum altogether. There were other tracks to race and by 1948 midgets had kind of run their course. They had been around since ’34, ‘35. So by this point, the midgets were going away, roadsters were coming into play. You might call them modifieds. There were no sprint cars yet, but bigger cars. They ran a few more big events when they ran in the Coliseum in 1948. They ran a board track, they actually built their own board track, and they ran a number of events there on wood. By all accounts, it was not very good racing because they weren’t really accustomed to the surface. It was a little too slick. But they were going fast. They were going 11.91 seconds a lap on the quarter-mile board track. The fastest time on the asphalt was a 17.3.
AW: The board track was banked, right?
HO: Right.
AW: And then there was a long stretch there with no racing in the Coliseum until the Mickey Thompson stadium races.
HO: Right. And those were glorious events – big, dramatic motorcycles jumping through the Peristyles and the whole bit. And that was the beginning of stadium Supercross and all that business, same thing they’re doing in a couple weeks down in Anaheim.
AW: And that went on for quite a while. Then a gap until the Busch Lights race about 20 years ago on a track around the outside of the Coliseum, am I right there?
HO: Right. They ran through the parking lot. They did not go inside the Coliseum at all.
AW: And now we have the Busch Light Clash on a quarter-mile track.
HO: They run stock cars at Orange Show Speedway (63 mils east), late models, and, that’s a quarter-mile track, right? So stock cars on a quarter mile track is not new. That’s not a big deal. The only thing that freaks people out is it’s NASCAR in their top guys. And they’re running on a short track.
This is going to be a spectacular event. The lights, the sounds, the crowd, you’re in this historic building, all of this stuff, you got the top stars of the game, and it’s going to be huge. Regardless of the outcome, it will be wildly entertaining.
AW: I assume you’ll be out there.
HO: I will be out there.
Keyword: A Brief History of Racing at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum