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.
