The City of Carlsbad approved 1.5 million square feet of office and light industrial to replace Carlsbad Raceway, while at the same time approving 2.1 million square feet across the street at Bressi Ranch. Doesn’t it occur to these guys whether we NEED 3.6 MILLION SQUARE FEET??
Maybe after this sits for a few more years we can convert it back:
A trip down memory lane:
Check out these websites for photos:
http://www.carlsbadraceway.org/index.html
http://www.savecarlsbadraceway.com/index.htm
http://www.carlsbadskatepark.org/index.html
FYI:
http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2009/10/19/daily79.html
Thanks Jim, way to open old wounds here. I loved the Carlsbad drags! I used to go there in my Lightning, never got the chance to take my old STi to compare times. That place was very special. We need more places like that, where maniacs like me can find out what their cars can really do, safely and legally. 1/8th mile tracks just don’t cut it.
I wonder how well my 66 Corvair would do? 200hp of rear engine fury! 😉
Ah, JTR: warmoing the bottom of my frozen cold hard black heart:
Here from http://www.vintagemx.us/forgottentracks.htm
Go to web site for nifty expandable overhead picture of track.
Carlsbad Raceway:
Palomar Airport Road off the I-5, Carlsbad.
The only other track from this era that still operates today. The drag strip was built in the 1950’s. Moto Cross was started in 1966 by CMC. This track is as famous as the Saddleback track, gaining international fame in the early 1970’s when a round of the 500 World Championship GP’s was held there and televised on Wide World Of Sports.
The track is still in operation today, although a shadow of it’s former self. The property has been sold several times (owners included the owners of the Wimpys hamburger chain). The topography of the site makes development difficult. While once in a rural area, the track is completely surrounded by industrial and high dollar residential development that is right to the fence surrounding the track. As the entrance to the property is being leveled for slabs, the end is rumored to be near.
My personal favorite as a Nor Cal flat track guy was of course, JC Agajanian’s Famous Ascot Park where the Harbor 91 and SD Fwys met near the famous ghetto of Watts. 1971 a $14.00 one-way flight on PSA San Jose to LA. Helmet, leathers and boots and ready to race….
Thanks for the memories jtr!
What a great report. I raced my motorcycle there every weekend! So sad to see the corporate greed take over a place that brought me so many great memories as a kid! I will never forget the USGP in the 80’s and watching ABC Superbikers live from Carlsbad raceway! What a special place!
Can’t you drag race at Qualcomm?
Such a shame to have lost this only to have it end up as yet another CRE failure. Too many communities tear up things like this, just so they can be a clone of Irvine. Instead of seeing the obvious, that being a clone doesn’t make them stand out or unique, they take what does make them unique and interesting and turn it into just another cookie cutter development.
Sure, sure, they want to “attract business”. If they had managed the unique (and rare) thing they had in their laps well, Carlsbad could’ve milked that. But I bet the stuffed shirts didn’t like the noise, the funny looking cars or the “crowd”, and are as imaginative as rocks.
Just wait until Carlsbad City Hall passes the plate to taxpayers to fund some sort of big entertainment or sports complex to “attract business investment”. That will be a good time to remind them how they mismanaged the one they relegated to the bulldozers. Oh wait, they’re doing that right now, to try and turn Legoland into a clone of the Disneyland Resort…
You can drag race at the Q and at least one other location (Barona), but they’re all 1/8th-mile tracks, which is less than half as much fun as 1/4-mile. 🙁
My office overlooks that entire area, I’m up off of Loker, Sea Lion Place above Melrose Looking East. Thats place is a mess. I have plenty of friends who raced there. Had lunch with Marty Motes one day a decade ago who won the USGP 3 decades ago, God rest his soul.
Thanks Anonymous at #4 – great link.
When I was a kid in the early 1970s we lived in Covina, and went to the Irwindale Drags a lot – it was where I started my appreciation of cars.
Loved Ascot Park too!
The link’s description of Irwindale:
Part of the famous night MX scene of the late 60’s early 70’s. In those days it was possible to race from Tuesday night through Friday nights every week.
In 1976 the city of Irwindale leased the property to Miller Brewing Company for one dollar a year to build a brewery. The main buildings sit on the exact spot the MX track was located. No evidence remains of the track or the drag strip.
Wouldn’t you really rather have THIS POS imposed on you instead of ‘dirty, smelly old racetrack” Ah for me, F – NO I would NOT environmentalist Nazis:
Environmental groups turn in paperwork for DMV fee to fund California state parks
By Paul Rogers
progers@mercurynews.com
Posted: 11/03/2009 01:05:07 PM PST
Updated: 11/03/2009 02:35:03 PM PST
Nov 3:
List of California State Parks with reduced days and other service cutbacksHoping to break the recent cycle of proposed state parks closures, a coalition of California environmental groups took the first major step Tuesday toward qualifying a measure for next November’s ballot that would roughly double the state parks budget by imposing a new annual fee on vehicle registration.
The text of the proposed ballot measure submitted to the attorney general’s office for a title and summary reveals some new information: The fee would be $18 a year per vehicle, not $15 as had been discussed earlier.
It would apply to nearly all vehicles, including motorcycles and RVs, but not commercial trucks.
ANY STATE POLITICIAN SUPPORTING THIS LATEST INSANITY GETS OUSTED FRM OFFICE. – CAREER IN POLITICS WOULD BE PERMANENTLY AND IRREVOCABLY OVER. Use jtr video here as proof of their prior misdeeds.
Just in – sewer water for Carlsbadians, another city-supported boondoggle! (desal plant will be less than a mile from sewer-treatment plant, both using the same ocean)
Poseidon Resources was issued its Coastal Development Permit Tuesday by the California Coastal Commission.
The permit allows Tetra Tech to begin preparing the site of the future Carlsbad desalination plant by Nov. 15 as planned, allowing for construction to get under way early next year.
The permit was originally approved Nov. 15, 2007 and a Marine Life Protection Plan and Energy Minimization and Greenhouse Reduction Plan were added Aug. 6, 2008. Since then Poseidon and the Coastal Commission have been working together to finalize the permit.
Poseidon began seeking permits for the desalination project in 1998. The company expects the plant to be operational in 2012, when it will produce a 50 million-gallon-per-day supply of fresh water — enough for an estimated 300,000 residents. Poseidon expects the $170 million project will create 2,100 jobs.
Several years ago, my nephew’s Pontiac club met at Jim Wangers office in San Marcos for a BBQ. I talked to Jim, and he told me how he tested cars at Carlsbad – and still used it for performance testing.
For those of you who don’t know Jim Wangers, he’s probably considered the father of the GTO. He’s a really interesting guy, and if you get a chance to see his “studio” in San Marcos, you’re a kid in a candy store!
https://wiki.bentleypublishers.com/display/tech/2009/06/23/Glory+Days+author+Jim+Wangers+interviewed+for+Fox+Business+News
Thanks for this piece Jim! I miss Carlsbad MX so much! Watched all my hero’s race there in the 70’s (DeCoster, Wolsink, Marty Smith, Croft, Lackey, etc.) Also raced many amateur Grand Prix & MX events. What a shame. Even for a large development company, $250K/month holding cost has gotta hurt.
The Raceway and the MX course were not all that was lost in this blunder. Adjacent to that were phenomenal and totally unique mountain bike trails that drew people from across the state. There was an online petition to save the trails at a site rideflightline.com, but it’s been taken down. I rode there for over 15 years, and it was one of the few things I would ever go to Carlsbad for. For me and a lot of my friends, it was a large part of our lives, now gone. It was an area that provided a great opportunity for three unique groups, and with such a great history. To have it bulldozed for more faceless business boxes is an insult to the people that have spent a lifetime here embracing what made Southern California special.
If I were to buy anywhere in SD county, Cbad would be it. They “get it”..
unfortunately for them California and the people who don’t have any economic clue about them are their worst enemy.
Jim, weather you know it or not a vacant park is nothing to delight in. Granted, your racetrack is gone but the world changes.
And if this state doesn’t get more Carlsbad’s were all in for a rude awakening.
Jim, remember Miller brewing sold the idea of the brewery to the citizenry by saying they would build an attraction similar to Busch gardens, providing entertainment to more people than the dragstrip. Curiously the public aspect of the brewery was never achieved.
My now wife and I were in San Diego in the summer of 1989, kept going south when we supposed to turn inland….saw a wooden roller coaster on the beach.
That was my introduction to Belmont Park. It rotted for years before it was restored just before my wife and I discovered it.
Maybe some gearheads should get together and buy some land in some of these REO towns and let’er rip.
My best friend’s family from Elementary through High School lived on the grounds of the raceway and managed it. I used to ride that track on my BMX bike every day during the summer.
ANY STATE POLITICIAN SUPPORTING THIS LATEST INSANITY GETS OUSTED FRM OFFICE. – CAREER IN POLITICS WOULD BE PERMANENTLY AND IRREVOCABLY OVER. Use jtr video here as proof of their prior misdeeds.
3rd Generation | November 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Um, chill the heck out. This has absolutely nothing to do with the racetrack closure. A private party owned the racetrack and sold it to another private party that built the industrial buildings in question. Plus, this is a ballot proposition-politicians don’t vote for it, voters do.
JimB, you are a horrible and illiterate troll. Shoo.
Thanks Kwaping, I’ve had enough of him too.
I was racking my brain trying to figure out what JimB meant on that last post he made. Incoherence.
This post fired up my (not-so-dormant) disappointment that we’ve sacked so many great relatively natural areas of land for commercial use (including mass production of residential real estate). Business interests have ruined so much of So Cal. I’m a conservative dude, yet on this issue I really think that a hefty chunk of “thou shalt leave that land alone” from government would have been a good thing, whether private property or not. Maybe that would have prevented the insane sea of rooftops east of I15.
Carlsbad gets it? Carlsbad doesn’t get it. The raceway was a great institution that could have added more revenue for Carlsbad and provided enjoyment for many folks. Instead there’s an empty, ugly business park. Nothing against the new golf course but I wish that some of that money ($70 million) had been used to buy the raceway property.
Hey,
We talk about the Grand Prix track and the dragstrip, but some of my more memorable times was going to watch the single speed motorcycles on the oval track. Burned oil in the air, wall crashes, and warm summer nights. That place was killer. Does anyone else remember?