One Last Drag Race…
Words and Photos by Michael Zurvalec
This is one of those stories I’ve been sitting on for a few months to try and figure out how to tell. It has not gone well, so I’m just going for it before I lose the motivation to do it again.
The “tower” at Irwindale.
December 5th, 2024, marked a day I’d begun to think might not ever come. It marked the last-ever edition of Thursday Night Thunder test-n-tune drag racing at Irwindale Dragstrip. The embattled track was a fixture of the San Gabriel Valley for two decades, visible off the 605 freeway like a rebellious child. It was also our last easily accessible track here in the LA/OC metro after Fontana closed ahead of Auto Club Speedway’s demolition for warehouse space. And now? Just like Fontana, Lions, Terminal Island, Carlsbad, OCIR, and LACR, Irwindale is gone.
When word came around that Irwindale was finally going to meet the wrecking ball, I did the one thing I could think to do – grabbed my wallet and bought a ticket for the last round of Thursday Night Thunder. In truth, I wish I’d done it sooner before tech cards sold out because I’ve never made a dragstrip pass in my life and I would’ve liked to make just one pass at Irwindale. I know this would not have gone well, but I was absolutely down for redlining a stock 350,000-mile Honda into the twilight. I mean, it’s not like Honda automatic transmissions are made of glass or anything and it’s not like I need that car to get to school every day, right?
Well, I didn’t get to make that dragstrip pass and for the sake of my old man, our mechanic, and his transmission guy, that’s probably for the best. Instead, I got to do the one thing I really needed to do. I got to say goodbye. I got to hang out on the fence at the top end of my local dragstrip one more time and that’s a feeling that’ll stay with me forever. I got to go say “goodbye” to one of the last pieces of my childhood before it got ground up into the paving base for a parking lot and that, well that was absolutely worth cutting class on a Thursday afternoon.
As I stood there, trackside by the top end I thought about how I took my best friend there years ago to finally show him why I was so into this stuff, I thought about my dad and his buddy Chris watching races with Chris’s father like something out of an 80’s car magazine one night when I should’ve been in bed for school the next day.
Trackside at Irwindale for the last time.
I shed some tears when I finally walked back to my car after mother nature finally put enough moisture on the track that racing had to wind down for the night and I’d had one last nostril full of tire smoke by the burnout pit. With the death of Irwindale Speedway, a raw and unfiltered, wild and politically incorrect chapter in LA history has finally come to a close and I for one feel pretty fortunate to have been able to experience it, even just a little.
Who Killed The Car Journalist?
Ford GT going into Turn 8 at the 2016 Long Beach Grand Prix.
Originally published in December 2023.
Words and Photo by Michael Zurvalec
Remember the days when awards like Car of the Year from Motor Trend used to mean something to consumers? Remember the days when you made it big in the aftermarket by getting your car or your products on the cover of Hot Rod or Popular Hot Rodding and the magazines had relevant content aimed at their readers? I do.
I grew up, at least a little, around publishing. After I was born, my mom stepped down as Managing Editor of a motorsports trade magazine and continued to freelance for them for about another decade or so. If you don’t own a shop, sell speed parts, or manage a racetrack fighting for survival you’ve probably never heard of Performance Racing Industry Magazine. PRI is a niche publication with less of the pomp and circumstance of a publication like Hot Rod and focuses on the business side of our hobby. They cover things like trends in sponsorships, business, legislative developments and so forth. They also put on the annual PRI show in Indianapolis where, as I understand it, the aftermarket can get together in the shadow of Indianapolis Motor Speedway without the tire-frying antics of a production like the SEMA show in Las Vegas.
But personally, PRI was a gateway to experiences I would have never had otherwise. It led me down a rabbit hole that had me watching Overhaulin’ on TLC and reading Hot Rod when I should’ve been doing my math homework. When Hot Rod launched a little show called Roadkill in 2012, I eagerly followed along from print media into YouTube as a teen and later onto MotorTrend Plus after a couple corporate buyouts.
In the almost twenty years since I first picked up that copy of PRI Magazine, I’ve been able to go on an absolutely wild ride. I met Chip Foose at a meet ‘n’ greet in Pomona, got to celebrate 65 years of Hot Rod Magazine in 2013 with an insane gathering of feature cars at the Fairplex, and I’ve been able to stand right on the fence at track level when the Top Fuel cars clear the top end at Pomona. I watched someone rear-end a tow truck during the last-ever Toyota Pro Celebrity Race in Long Beach, took a Christmas card photo in the seat of some guy’s bracket drag racer in the 7th grade, and I’m actually in the background of a couple shots in an issue of DSPORT magazine event coverage at Fontana. I think I was in line for the taco truck or something like that. In short, the mid-2010’s were an absolutely wild ride for someone who couldn’t even work yet. Finnegan and Freiburger were off trying to drive a Ranchero to Alaska…again, car YouTube was at its most ridiculous, and Ford was even back at LeMans with an all-new GT. Car people were out to have fun and car journalists were out to document it.
Unfortunately, as they say, all good things must come to an end and after the death of Popular Hot Rodding in 2014 the times began to change. By 2018, MotorTrend YouTube content was behind a paywall now called Motor Trend Premium and by 2019 TEN Publishing had announced that 19 of its titles would live on only as brands and digital content. Now, with quiet announcement that even Hot Rod itself is set to become a quarterly publication from January of ’24 I believe that we’re well and truly at the end of an era. Just like the 1950’s, the hot-rodder is public enemy #1 and the world is changing. It’s a shame too because some of the greatest innovations in motor transport have just begun. Alternative fuels, alternative powerplants, and developments in the very science and technology that drive us forward are truly fascinating to follow but they don’t generate the clicks or impressions they need to be viable. You’re either Cleetus McFarland or HeavyDSparks on YouTube wrecking stuff for no reason ‘cause you’re rich or Johnny Lieberman getting drunk on his friend’s podcast while trying to downplay the environmental crisis of EV batteries. That’s not journalism, in fact it’s not even entertainment anymore because we’ve been indoctrinated as a society to believe anything and everything that we’ve seen on the interwebs. At the end of the day, the question still remains: who killed the car journalist? We can blame the EPA, we can blame media conglomerates like Discovery, we can even blame the readers or viewers but personally, I think the car journalist is a victim of their own success.
Editors Note, Feb. 2025: In November 2024, Warner Bros/Discovery announced the shutdown of MotorTrend Studios and the cancellation of all MotorTrend Original Programing. Motor Trend print titles were also acquired in a seperate deal by Hearst Communications. Strange times.
~MZ
A Rainy Day in Riverside
Originally published in 2020 and later 2023.
Words and Photos by Michael Zurvalec
By most accounts, March 10th, 2020 is considered the last “normal” day of our lives. Since then we’ve battled seemingly endless waves of a certain virus, violence on Capitol Hill, and watched the world hover dangerously over a big, red metaphorical self-destruct button. In the week before I’d been joking about shipping someone off to China if they wouldn’t shut up and I’d started making plans for a weekend in the mountains with my friends at the end of March. By the end of the week, those plans had been tabled indefinitely and I was settling in for what they said would be an easy two weeks of “flattening the curve.” Instead, ten months into “15 days to flatten the curve” I sat down and wrote about what I was doing on that last, “normal” day. I published it on an old blog I’ve since taken down for various reasons and now, as we approach three years, I’ve sat down again to revise that piece and share it with the world so, here it goes.
On Tuesday March 10th, 2020, I stood in the rain, practicing my street photography in downtown Riverside, California. The main street promenade was empty and the Mission Inn’s bell tower poked ominously into the clouds above the streets and faux-western facades. The galleries at UCR Arts were virtually empty and I was even able to have a one-one-one discussion about an exhibit in the adjacent California Museum of Photography with the museum’s senior curator about the exhibit I’d come to see. Titled “Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West”, it features a sobering series of images taken by professional photographers on the front lines of some of the decade’s worst wildfires in the American southwest with many from our own California backyard. Display cases among the paintings showcased the burnt remnants of a photographer’s life and studio while video footage of California’s infamous Camp Fire played in the background.
I wandered the gallery with my iPhone in hand, making notes on photos and the museum in general for a college essay due that Friday, pausing to look at an 80’s-era Nikon before marveling inside the museum’s enormous camera obscura on the third floor and it’s inverted view of the office building across the promenade. I don’t think I could’ve been any happier that day, alone in an empty museum filled with photographic memorabilia and a refreshingly eclectic mix of work from both rotating exhibits and the museums vast collection with nothing but time.
Writing about that day now, almost three years later that adage about the calm before a storm rings true. When I walked the main street promenade before the museum opened, everything seemed quiet, a little too quiet if you ask me and I already had a surgical mask and Purell appropriated from my dad’s work in my pocket to make my mom feel better when I left the house that morning. To me, and I think a lot of people at the time, the pandemic and the changes it would bring with it still seemed a little too far-fetched to be true, the realm of a bad Hollywood disaster film instead of a world-altering beast waiting to rear its ugly head.
A week later though, as I was waiting for the fate of my semester and for the grade on that essay, I flipped through the memory card from that day in Riverside and selected five images that would make up a small album I now call “The Last Normal Day.”
Like the opening scene of a movie the wet, empty streets and an ominous grey overcast sky paint a picture fit for some opening credits and leave even me, the photographer who took the pictures asking, “is this really it?” I grappled then with my thoughts for months to come up with a name for them and at one point even felt obligated to call it something philosophical, to make a statement with it but instead, I opted to call it what it was and leave it at that. After all, it was the last normal day I can remember.
Notes:
"Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West" went off exhibit at the California Museum of Photography in August of 2021. Select images from that exhibit can be viewed here:
https://virtualucrarts.ucr.edu/facing-fire/
For more information about UCR Arts and the California Museum of Photography, visit:
UCR ARTS
3824 + 3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501
Tel: (951) 827-4787
The Camp Photographer
Originally published 2/8/23
Words and Photos by Michael Zurvalec
After almost a year of shooting and another spent thinking about how best to word this, I think the time’s come for me to finally share how I became the unofficial camp photographer so, here it goes:
Like many things over my time at Tahquitz, becoming the camp photographer started out as an innocent favor among friends one afternoon. Back then, every Scout unit that came to camp would have a group photo taken by a professional photographer during the check-in process and be given the option to purchase copies of it at the end of the week. As a scout I never enjoyed that process much, oftentimes it would take an unhealthy amount of shouting and pointing to get my zombie hoard of a scout troop lined up to take a photo and as a staff member I always felt bad husting scouts from the pool back to their campsites to get dressed for dinner only to have to make them stand still for a picture. At the same time, I always had a fair bit of respect for Gary, the older, bearded gentleman up on a ladder taking those photos week after week, summer after summer. Gary, as I learned early on ran his operation out of a small, rustic studio about 15 miles down the highway from our camp and had spent the last nearly four decades as the go-to photographer for most camps in the area so when the summer of 2019 rolled around, it looked like Gary would be shooting all our photos again too. I’d still packed my camera with me when I showed up for staff and assumed my “duties” would be limited to the quick shots I took of every staff member during training week and whatever photos I found time to shoot as the summer went on. I wanted to build off a set of photos I shot during a team building activity the previous summer and at the very least we could use those photos for social media content in the off-season.
As it turned out, that plan worked great for all of about two weeks before I got called up into the camp office one hot, dusty Sunday afternoon and I knew by the look on Christian and Jason’s faces something was up. They said they were really sorry to do this to me and asked me would I mind taking that week’s photos for them? Apparently Gary had suffered a medical emergency and would be unable to continue taking those photos for the rest of the summer and stupidly, I agreed.
I have a newfound respect for the antics that photographers go through now after those three weeks of herding cats and an incredible gratitude to the staff members who both kept me off the deep end and helped wrangle hoards of scouts into something resembling order to take a quick picture. Unlike Gary, I lacked a lot of the “professional” equipment one would expect to see for a job like that and shot everything on a mid-range Canon DSLR with a cheap kit lens and a Speedlite that dated back almost forty years to my dads time as a photo communications student. I would shoot the photos, spend either a late Sunday night or a hectic Monday morning between sessions of program sorting through upwards of two hundred frames into folders by troop and then deliver them down to Gary’s studio due to the limitations of camp’s internet connection. I don’t ever want to do that again, but almost four years aver the fact I can look back and say that while challenging, it was a wonderful learning experience that I feel fortunate to have had.
13 months later, after I’d sworn off camp staff, a global pandemic swept through, and the camp we all knew and loved nearly burnt to the ground I returned once again with the same old camera and became the unofficial camp photographer. This time however, I came of my own free will, I wasn’t forced into anything, and had a very simple assignment: tell a story.
I returned that day in October, again in November and again over several weekends during the following year to follow and document the process of dragging Tahquitz in some cases kicking and screaming out of Covid hibernation and getting camp back into shape for summer camp in 2021 and you know what? I loved every minute of it. Alright, maybe not the time I fell through a hole in the floor of the old Ranger’s House or the time I fell backwards into the lake but almost every minute of it. I got to experience camp in the snow for the first time, and capture not only my own memories, but everyone else’s too.
Out of all the hundreds of frames I shot over those four years, a few stand out as real highlights and a couple make me cry from time to time. In September, I took a group shot of all the volunteers who turned up to help welcome Joe, the new Camp Director to his post by demolishing the interior of his house and in November I got to experience camp in the snow for the first time as a group of us walked around and brainstormed ideas for the coming year. I took photos of my friends and photos of the place I called home for so many summers. In January 2021 I took a couple photos of my friends Max, Jack, Jason, and Josh when we broke out of quarantine for another day in the snow and in August, I rigged a remote shutter to take the staff photo for what truly became my last year on staff. Even now, its difficult to look at those photos. A week after that snow day in early January I received the horrible news that Max had died over the weekend in a terrible accident and in the spring of that same year I granted permission to use one of my photos as the basis for the staff shirt design. It’s a wonderful design, don’t get me wrong but If I had known then I was going to be on staff I wouldn’t have allowed it.
My time as an unofficial camp photographer was a crash course in everything from stress management and storytelling to time management and organization. I learned a lot in two relatively short visits to Gary’s studio and even more just wandering the camp property during those first few workdays back before summer camp and in the end, it was a way for me to say one last goodbye to camp before I moved on to bigger, more important, more “adult” things in my life.
Above the City of Angels
Originally published on 10/21/22
“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
It’s true, Los Angeles is a jungle. One great, big, concrete jungle where people come from all around to try and “make it” in the land of fancy coffee and hipster food. Personally, I don’t care for much of LA. The traffic’s bad, the weather’s the same, and most of the tourist attractions are just that: tourist attractions designed to bleed you dry. True, most of LA is a jungle but just like any jungle out of all the darkness, there’s always something bound to impress.
Located on a prime spot towards the top of Griffith Park, the Griffith Observatory was formally opened to the public in the spring of 1935. Throughout the decades, the observatory has seen it all, from the second world war, doomsday predictions, mankind’s first steps on the moon, and record-breaking crowds to view comets passing by. In May of 2020, the observatory celebrated its 85th birthday under a cloud of anxiety during the early stages of the Coronavirus pandemic before finally reopening in the summer of 2021.
For me, the Griffith holds a special place in my heart. For years growing up, my grandmother took my cousins, my sister, and I all over SoCal every summer for a week she used to call “Camp Grandma.” For all the botanical gardens, old Spanish missions, and the hours spent at “educational” stops like Kidseum over in Pasadena, there were trips to mind-blowing places like the LA Natural History Museum, thought-provoking places like the Autry Museum of the American West, and incredible places like the Griffith Observatory.
I remember visiting for the first time around 2007 shortly after the observatory underwent a multimillion dollar renovation. I remember seeing the Hollywood Sign for the first time, the Foucault pendulum in the lobby, and displays that calculated your weight on other planets in relation to earth. There’s even a wall with samples (sealed off obviously), of the entire periodic table inside for the super nerdy. To be fair though, as cool as it was to visit as a kid I was really too young to truly appreciate everything there is to see and experience and because we used to drive up with Grandma during the summer we’d have to leave by 2pm in order to beat the LA rush hour or we’d never get back to Orange County. Instead, for the next 15 years I would stare at pictures of the observatory and remember how much I wanted to watch the sunset, look through the big telescope and stare out at the lights of LA. On a good day, you can see out over Hollywood, Los Feliz, all the way to downtown, Century City, and sometimes even all the way out to the Westside.
Finally, this September I went back to the observatory and did just that. Like my earlier visits, it’s still best to park down by the Greek Theatre and ride the Los Feliz DASH up the hill. As of right now, the bus fare is free though I should mention, this only works when there isn’t a concert at the Greek.
After 15 years, and a letdown last year, I finally got to watch the sun set from the roof and stare through the original Zeiss telescope and even better? I got to view the rings of Saturn. Look, I know to most people, staring through a telescope isn’t something to write home about, let alone almost a thousand words. But I got to live out a childhood dream that night and view Saturn through not only the same telescope I used to dream about, but the same telescope installed at the observatory in 1935 and that’s pretty cool.
Anyway, after my turn in the dome, I headed back onto the roof and stared out at the lights of LA for a while. I actually posted this photo as part of a set on Instagram that same night, but I’m writing this because I wanted to go into a longer, more detailed form about that image. I didn’t really put a whole lot of thought into it, in fact I just sort of ballparked some camera settings, took a risk just setting it down on the ledge and letting 15 seconds of shutter time do its thing. Personally, I really like it. I know its not my “best” work, or even the best photo of LA ever, even that little snapshot stands for 15 years of dreaming high above the City of Angels.