![]() ![]() ![]() The “hot rodders” (the term was not popularly used until the 1940s) raced on a number of western Mojave dry lakes over the years, including Muroc (known today as Rogers Dry Lake), Harper, Rosamond, El Mirage and, on occasion, Cuddeback. The association is now considered to be the oldest organization of its kind and remains a nonprofit, non-commercial volunteer endeavor with a multi-generational membership. Known today as SCTA, the organization’s first hosted event took place in 1938. Several of the original race-clubs charters including the Sidewinders and the Roadrunners, formed the Southern California Timing Association in 1937. Multi-participant competitions were eliminated in favor of racing against the clock. Racers drove out in their race rides and camped out on the lakebed-a far cry from the plush monster RVs and vehicle trailer transports one sees at the playa today.īy the late 1930s, these word-of-mouth racing events became more organized in an effort to establish safety guidelines and implement racing standards. Services, if they existed at all, were spotty. The trip into the remote northern reaches of the desert was hot and rough. These rough-and-tumble fellows were some of the earliest pioneers of drag racing.įor those early participants obsessed with their sport, just getting out to their desert playground proved difficult-one had to travel a series of winding two-lane mountain roads through the San Gabriels to reach the lakebeds located in the largely undeveloped western Mojave region. Here, they would pit their chopped-up four-bangers (mostly modified four-cylinder Ford Model T’s) against one another in unbridled, multi-car lineups across the dry lake bed. Sometime during the 1920s, weekend gearheads from greater Los Angeles, in an effort to avoid the law meddling in their “hoodlum” street racing activities, began heading out to Muroc Dry Lake some 100 miles north of Downtown L.A. ![]() The fast, flat alkali playas of the western Mojave have beckoned a certain type of individual obsessed with speed and the machines that take them there for nearly 100 years now. ![]()
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