Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1394357
F aces were sullen on the morn- ing of April 11, 1975 at Texas Stadium as a steady rain all week had turned Pace Motor Sport's $50,000 investment in dirt into a soupy brown mess. The success- ful promoters of the Houston Short Track and TT Nationals decided to bring the AMA Grand National show to the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas, and the home of the Dallas Cowboys. Although Texas Stadium had just enough of a roof to protect the fans, the problem was the 2 1/2-acre hole smack- dab in the middle that left the field exposed. Things were looking grim. Amateur flat trackers were slated to take to the track that night followed by the pros the next day. West Coast track-prep wizard Harold Murrell as- sessed the situation and then went into action. No one dreamed the track could be made raceable, but Murrell wasn't going to throw in the towel. Instead, he tossed in 21 dump-truck loads of sand, 26 tons of dry concrete, and enough calcium chloride to clear the streets of a Buffalo bliz- zard. Murrell then kneaded the whole concoction like so much pizza dough, and laid out a track that was race-worthy—rough for sure, but race-worthy nevertheless. Mur- rell had saved the day—for the promoter, for the fans and for the racers, who had traveled from all across the country to get there to race. Kenny Roberts won the Dallas Short Track National on Saturday over Randy Cleek on a much-improved track, and Murrell was a hero. Murrell was born in Oklahoma, but like tens of thousands of Okies before him, he ended up in sunny California, specifically Fresno. As a young man, Murrell got into motorcycles and started participating in field meets and became a leading off-road racer in his district. The fact that Murrell became the nation's master track builder happened by sheer chance. Had it not been for a grader opera- tor with a particular taste for the bottle, Murrell said he might have been a suit-and-tie man. "I had a little dirt track in Selma, and I didn't know how to run a road grader," Murrell said in a 1979 interview with the Oakland Tribune. "But I had a problem with my grader operator. He was a wino. One day he didn't show up and I said 'Hey, I'm going to learn how to do this, because I sure can't depend on him.'" That was in the late 1950s, and, within a decade, Murrell's skill at prepping a flat track put him in demand at dirt tracks all across the West Coast. When stadium racing began in the late 1960s and early '70s, Murrell was the go-to guy. Choosing to learn to operate that grader led to Murrell traveling all across the country, and even the world, to build motorcycle (and occasion- ally stock-car) dirt racetracks. Murrell's dirt-racing surfaces were so predictable they were legendary. He got so good at understanding various forms of sands, silts and clays that he began receiving packages of dirt from frustrated dirt-track owners pleading for him to figure out how to make their tracks better. "We mix it with water and cal- CN III ARCHIVES P110 Harold Murrell THE SULTAN BY LARRY LAWRENCE Harold Murrell's favorite work was prepping the soil for the San Jose Mile.