Sometimes, Nowhere Is a Moment As Much As a PlaceIllustration by Natalie FossOn a rotating planet orbiting a small star, amid a swirling galaxy swimming in a universe with trillions of galaxies, the difference between somewhere and nowhere is about perspective.This story originally appeared in Volume 37 of Road & Track.For the car obsessed, the promise of the perfect nowhere is nirvana. A nowhere without neighbors who complain about noise. A nebulous realm with roads that don't head anywhere in particular but are curvy, scenic, and barely patrolled. A wilderness where sports cars can push, muscle cars can roar, and off-roaders can bash. All opportunity, no consequences. Nowhere is car-person paradise. Theoretically.Car culture's nowheres inevitably evolve into somewheres. There's a sweet spot between the moment the potential of a nowhere is recognized and when civilization intrudes upon the space.In 1950, Southern California's Riverside County was almost empty. Only about 170,000 people were spread out across 7300 square miles. It was scrubland southeast of Los Angeles—tough to farm, dusty, and usually blisteringly hot. It was the middle of nowhere. Even better, it was nowhere with highway access.In the mid-Fifties, Rudy Cleye, an amateur road racer, saw potential in Riverside County's nowhereness. A turkey farm—a 640-acre chunk of desert near Route 60 outside the unincorporated town of Edgemont—was primed to become somewhere. March Air Force Base was sort of close, but the Air Force wasn't going to whine. Cleye petitioned the Riverside County Board of Supervisors and was cleared to develop the land. What he created was one great racetrack, an incubator of legends.Only about 50 miles from downtown L.A., Riverside Raceway would be close enough to attract a paying crowd and bring in the maniacs then building Southern California's car culture. "Before Riverside, there wasn't anything else near Los Angeles," racer Dan Gurney told Vintage Motorsport in 2002 of the 3.25-mile circuit. "You had some small tracks—Pomona, Torrey Pines near San Diego, Paramount Ranch, Palm Springs, and Santa Barbara—but none of them had prestige."When Riverside Raceway opened in 1957, it was still nowhere, so rarely visited that the Los Angeles Mirror newspaper had to tell its readers how to get there. Over the next 31 years, Riverside offered almost every form of motorsport: drag racing, NASCAR, epic SCCA Can-Am and Trans-Am battles, and even a Formula 1 event. For many Southern Californians, racing was the first reason to head east into the desert. And many of them grew comfortable trudging to what became known as the Inland Empire.Bobby Allison on the way to winning the 1975 Winston Western 500. Riverside was a NASCAR staple until 1988.ISC Images & Archives - Getty ImagesThe San Bernardino Freeway was subsumed into the transcontinental Interstate 10. Route 60 was widened and expanded to become the Pomona and Moreno Valley Freeways. Los Angeles land grew expensive over time, but the Inland Empire was (and still is) relatively cheap. Explosive population growth meant that by 1980, more than 660,000 people lived in Riverside County. Edgemont was renamed and incorporated as the city of Moreno Valley in 1984. In some significant part, that growth was because of the track's prominence. Riverside Raceway was now smack-dab in the middle of a somewhere it helped create. So, like many other racetracks, it was doomed. It created its own destruction.In 1988, Riverside ran its last race, NASCAR's Budweiser 400. Houses and condos cover much of what used to be track, and crowning it all, right off the 60, is the enclosed Moreno Valley Mall, which opened in 1992. Riverside County is still hot and dusty but is now the 10th-most populous county in the U.S., with more than 2.5 million residents. The city of Moreno Valley has more than 200,000. Yet the mall is dying. Macy's is open, but much of the retail space is vacant. About the closest acknowledgment of the racetrack that had once been there is a store called Diecastz that sells toy cars. Nearly shopper-free the day I visited in July, the building was evacuated after a fire alarm sounded. But at least Diecastz was still open. The sales clerk was unaware of the old racetrack. The Moreno Valley Mall is on the verge of reverting back to being nowhere.Cars operate at ground level. Fly across the United States, and from 32,000 feet, much of it looks like empty nowhere. Utah's Route 12 is a squiggly line instead of 124 miles of challenging pavement that runs through two of the state's five national parks. Colorado's mountainous Route 550 between Silverton and Ouray, the Million Dollar Highway, looks two-dimensional from five miles up but will scare even jaded drivers in the best possible way. Nowhere up there is a special somewhere down here.Nowhere is a necessity for manufacturers too. GM opened its Milford Proving Ground in 1924, when the village of Milford was part of southeast Michigan's predominantly agricultural landscape, 40 miles from Detroit. Only about 90,000 people then lived in the surrounding Oakland County, more than a third of whom were concentrated in the city of Pontiac. Today, Milford itself is still small, but the metro area has blossomed out around it, and Oakland County has almost 1.3 million people filling its suburban nooks, township crannies, and village cubbyholes. The Milford Proving Ground as it stands today could never be built in the 21st century. It's a 102-year-old artifact of a bygone time, before the cars it helped create enabled the sprawl that consumed the most proximate nowheres. Hyundai and Honda have proving grounds in the Mojave Desert, the most inhospitable part of California. Nissan and Toyota have proving grounds in the desert of Arizona. Places that remain nowhere but are somewhere to car nerds.When the Moreno Valley Mall is bulldozed, it will leave no legends behind. No stories of Mark Donohue, Parnelli Jones, Carroll Shelby, and Ken Miles shopping at Macy's. But the ground there will never be nowhere again. Because it has been sanctified by the racing that took place upon it, it will always be somewhere.If You Can Only Own One Car, Make It One of TheseThese Are the Most Popular Cars by State
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