Magnificent, merciless Riverside: the F1 circuit too lethal for racing

Riverside was magnificent precisely because it was so raw. It demanded absolute commitment, and the consequences for half-measures were severe. The early 1960s were an era when safety barriers were largely theoretical: the notion of ‘run-off’, if the term were ever even used, amounted to a few feet of dust before you hit something solid. The Southern Californian heat cooked engines, roasted tyres, and occasionally melted the resolve of lesser drivers. Yet those who truly got the hang of the RIR revered it with a passion bordering on obsession. Dan Gurney, who knew it as well as anyone, and always drove it brilliantly, once called it “the best damn’ track in America”. Carroll Shelby, who raced there before becoming the Cobra-creating legend that he will always now be remembered as, said simply, “Riverside separates the men from the boys — and the live ones from the dead.”

If that sounds grim, well, Riverside was indeed grim, in the way that circuits often were back then. But it was also alive. The place had a soul – an energy that modern venues, for all their razzmatazz, rarely manage to capture. Stirling Moss told Kevin Magnussen and me, when we visited his Mayfair pad together in 2016, that it was the kind of racetrack that “demanded a conversation with a car”. You did not simply drive it: “You coaxed it, you cajoled it, and woe betide you if you tried to fight it,” he added. Spectators adored it because the racing looked as wild as it felt. Drivers slid their machines through the corners on the ragged edge of their skinny tyres’ adhesion, a blur of noisy colour against the dun backdrop of the Southern Californian desert. The air glistened with heat and hydrocarbons, and, when dusk fell, the mountains glowed crimson in approval.

After the 1960 United States Grand Prix, F1 never returned. Perhaps that was inevitable. The European teams had found the logistics too exhausting, and the facilities too primitive, and some of the drivers adjudged the place a little too scary for their liking. The following year, 1961, Watkins Glen offered less danger and better infrastructure, and Riverside’s place in F1 history thereby became a footnote. Yet it continued to thrive as a domestic venue. USAC, NASCAR, Trans-Am, and Can-Am — every Stateside category worth its salt — all raced there. It was the proving ground for American motor sport’s greatest generation, but it was also a place where they learned that the thrill of the racing chase often came at a high price.

That price, ultimately, was too high. Riverside’s perils became harder to justify as race cars grew faster and the sport matured. The accidents that killed Pedro von Dory in 1960, Peter Hessler and Pat Pigott in 1962, Stuart Dane in 1963, Joe Weatherly, George Koehne, and Jim Ladd in 1964, Ken Miles in 1966, Billy Foster in 1967, Vic Tandy in 1968, Mel Andrus in 1971, Bill Spencer in 1975, Sonny Easley in 1978, Tim Williamson in 1980, and Rolf Stommelen and John Goss in 1983, together underscored Riverside’s deadly potential. Efforts were made to improve its safety levels, but there was only so much that anyone could do with its lethal topography. Meanwhile, the land beneath it grew more valuable than the racing upon it. Southern California was booming, and developers began eyeing the acreage with the same hunger that Turn 9 reserved for oversteering Porsches.

By the mid-1980s Riverside was living on borrowed time. The last big race there, the 1988 Budweiser 400, a NASCAR Winston Cup round won by Rusty Wallace in a Blue Max Racing Pontiac, was a farewell of sorts – a loud, smoky celebration tinged with melancholy. However, a handful of minor races were run at Riverside in late 1988 and early 1989. The very last one, a Sports Car Club of America (aka SCCA) event held on the weekend of July 1 and 2, 1989, claimed the life of Mark Verbofsky.

Shortly thereafter, the bulldozers arrived. The tarmac was torn up, the grandstands were dismantled, and the desert was reclaimed by concrete and commerce. Today, a vast shopping mall sits on the site, its car parks tracing the ghostly outlines of the old straights and curves. If you stand in the right spot, near the JC Penney entrance, you are roughly where the start-finish straight used to be. It is difficult not to feel a pang of regret, despite the past tragedies, and to regard the transformation as somehow sacrilegious.

Yet we should not be entirely mournful. Riverside’s passing, like that of many great circuits — Reims, Rouen, even the old Hockenheim — was and is part of motor sport’s evolution. Safety has improved, professionalism has increased, and the world has moved on. Even so, there is something poignant about the idea that the ground that once shook with the guttural yowling of Cobras and Chaparrals now vibrates to the wheels of shopping trolleys. The human need for speed, it seems, can be as fleeting as it is fervent. We chase the horizon until someone builds a retail park on it.

Still, Riverside’s ghost lingers, and you can feel it in the DNA of a few of today’s best American road courses – Laguna Seca, Road Atlanta, even Circuit of the Americas – each of which owes something, consciously or not, to the template that Riverside set, for the RIR’s beguiling blend of natural geography and technical challenge was ahead of its time. Even today, sim racers seek out digital recreations of Riverside, eager to test themselves against a phantom from the past. Virtual or not, the track’s charisma endures.

What made it special, too, was that it existed squarely in, and was emblematic of, an epoch of American racing that was rough and ready, yet glamorous and gladiatorial. The California of the late 1950s was the beating heart of car culture – hot rods on the Pacific Coast Highway, dragsters on dry lakes, and sports cars thundering around a fast and daunting racetrack in the Moreno Valley. Yes, Riverside embodied that spirit perfectly. It was not European sophistication; it was raw, sun-bleached, unapologetically American speed. Hollywood stars flocked to the RIR – Bob Hope had shares in it, and Steve McQueen and Paul Newman both raced there, drawn by the heady mix of danger and machismo. For them, as for the professionals, Riverside was both playground and bullring. You didn’t have to win there to be somebody — but, if you did, your reputation would be set fair for ever.

At places such as Riverside there therefore remains a spectral yearning not only for the racing that once took place there but also for the kind of people who once did that racing: men, and a few pioneering women, who regarded danger as part of the deal, who understood that courage was a currency, and who admired such racetracks, unforgiving as they were, because they paid out in glory. Riverside did not flatter; it exposed. If you could spar with it, without letting it floor you, you would earn the approbation of rivals and spectators alike. On the other hand, to put it another way, if you got through a race at Riverside without blistered hands and a singed sense of mortality, it is likely that you had not been trying hard enough.

That spirit, I think, is why Riverside still resonates. Even those who never saw it – indeed, who were not even born when it was razed – speak of it with wonderment. It represents an ideal of motor sport that feels increasingly distant: a time when circuits had quirks, when risk was all too real, and when the line between triumph (not merely success) and tragedy (not merely failure) was measured in inches (not merely data). The modern F1 world, understandably, has little patience for such deleterious romanticism. Yet if F1 is to retain its soul, it must never forget where it came from, and Riverside is one of the places that defined its character – and, in Liberty Media speak, its brand.

In the stately bar of the Goring Hotel in London’s Belgravia I once met an old man – no, an elderly gentleman – who told me, in a clipped Mid-Atlantic accent, that he had been at Riverside in 1960. He described the heat and the dust, and the sight and the sound of Stirling Moss, “as serene as a matador, flicking his Lotus through the corners as though the laws of physics were mere suggestions”. “It wasn’t safe,” he added, “but it was marvellous.” And there, in those few splendidly well chosen words, lies the essence of Riverside.

I imagine that its ghosts are polite enough to let the shoppers shop in peace. But every now and then, as the afternoon sun drops behind the Box Spring Mountains, and as the shadows begin to lengthen across the mall’s vast car park, perhaps they stir. Maybe the faint rumble of a Chevy V8 or even a Climax straight-4 drifts through the warm air, and, for a fleeting moment, the land remembers what it once was, just as I have sometimes felt that I could hear the muted scream of a Ferrari 375’s Lampredi V12 when the wind was rustling the leaves in the trees on a misty morning at Monza.