Waltrip Waxes Nostalgic for Riverside Raceway
It's been a good long while since NASCAR visited Riverside International Raceway. Nearly 20 years, actually.
But Fox commentator Darrell Waltrip just gave a shoutout to the long-gone, nine-turn road-course track.
RIR, as it was known for short, sat near the intersection of the 60 and 215 freeways in the Moreno Valley area. It went up when there wasn't much of anything in MoVal except March AFB.
The last NASCAR race run there was on June 12, 1988. Rusty Wallace won.
Soon after, RIR was torn down, and a shopping center pretty much covers most of the old course.
:I loved Riverside," Waltrip blurted, when the talk turned to site of today's race. "When you talk about tracks around here ...
"I raced at Riverside two years before I realized it was paved."
Dirt certainly looms large in my recollection of the Riverside track, too. The parking lots weren't paved. And when it was dry, cars bumping into the vacant acreage they called parking lots would raise huge clouds of dust.
And drivers often got off into the dirt when trying to pass.
It was a lousy track, really. It always felt as if it was never quite finished. Like, eventually they'll pave this, right, and put in some decent seating, yes?
But we tend to remember almost all old things fondly, don't we? We probably could find someone who would talk up Ontario Motor Speedway, too.
The last race at OMS was the season-finale in 1980. The next six season-enders were in Riverside, which always annoyed NASCAR's hard-core fans. They didn't think SoCal race fans cared enough about the magnitude of the last race, and we probably didn't.