El Mirage and Land Speed Racing

By Antonio Alvendia

Antonio Alvendia

About an hour and a half north of Los Angeles lies El Mirage, a historic dry lake bed that has been a home to land speed racing andthe organization that hosts these land speed racing events, the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) for over 60 years. Just think about it – sixty years! That’s a long time. Even though it is only about 1.5 hours from where I live and I’ve known about El Mirage for years, I had never actually been to El Mirage until this past weekend.

For me, the journey to El Mirage was something like a time warp. We had to drive through the high desert of the Antelope Valley, and eventually began noticing lots of old homes and old buildings… not to mention ghost-town looking businesses that look like they haven’t seen a customer walk through their doors in a decade.

On Sunday, Travis and I decided to drive our Nissan Cube press vehicle up to El Mirage to check out the scene and see what it was all about. On the way to the legendary dry lake bed, we stopped off at this liquor store/gas station for drinks, and were happy to find an old Ford hot rod parked outside at the gas pump. I approached the owner of the car, a gentleman named Dave, and said hello while he was refueling his hot rod with a funnel, as the gas station’s modern style gas nozzles wouldn’t be long or slender enough to get the entire neck of the fuel nozzle into the vintage gas tank without spilling onto the side of his old Ford. Continue reading and view more photos at MotorMavens!