Just before the holidays, I had the good fortune of attending a special tribute dinner at Southern California’s Petersen Automotive Museum. The museum holds several of these dinners each year to honor a different facet of automotive or racing history. In the last year or two there have been racing tributes to the Trans-Am series, the Can-Am series and even a special dinner honoring actor James Garner’s involvement in motorsport. However, this most recent dinner was devoted jointly to the history of Riverside Raceway and as a tribute to Dan Gurney. At first blush it might seem an odd combination to honor both a track and a driver on the same night, but in the case of Gurney and Riverside the two names are almost inseparable.
The brainchild of Southern California racer and restaurateur Rudy Cleye (with financial backing from fellow racer John Edgar), construction on Riverside Raceway began in January 1957. Interestingly, as the bulldozers graded the circuit over the next several months, the workers noticed a couple of local kids on motorcycles who repeatedly followed them around the track as they worked. No one at the time could have known that one of those kids would feature so prominently in the future of the track they were building. Who were those kids? Local Riverside boys Skip Hudson and Dan Gurney.
