CN
III ARCHIVES
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
F
inding remnants of the old Vaca Valley
Raceway is pretty tough to do these
days. I walked through waist-high brown
grass, trying to avoid some of the sharp
barbs of some sort of wicked weeds. Fi-
nally I hit upon patches of crumbling pave-
ment, the grass and weeds doing a good
job of hiding the once thriving racetrack.
After a half-hour or so in the midday sun,
triple-digit temperatures and stubbornly
spikey weeds inspire me to give up my
walk of the property. There wasn't much to
see anyway, a few remain-
ing patches of long crum-
bling pavement, a stray
telephone pole or two in
the middle of nowhere
and a rusting old entryway
that once saw some of the
best road racers of the
1960s cross to race on
the 2.1-mile road course
near Vacaville, California.
Local historian and Va-
caville Heritage Council
member Doug Rodgers,
who wrote a history of the raceway in the 2011,
described what remains of the raceway now as
little more than "a ghost track" with little more than
patches of weed-dominated asphalt, a lonely pow-
er pole and a decrepit entry gate.
"It just crumbled away," Rodgers said, adding
that almost the entire track was disked under after
it was closed to keep local kids from sneaking their
cars onto the track for impromptu races.
The track was built in the late 1950s by Royce
Ratterman, a Richmond contractor, and Harry
Burge, a Concord businessman, as an Indy-style
2.1-mile, seven-turn race track, which also incor-
porated a 1.25-mile in-
terior oval with banked
turns and a 4500-foot
drag strip on the east
side. It was one of
the first such tracks
to have all three types
of racing facilities in a
single location. Every-
thing from Indy cars,
sprint cars and midg-
ets, to dragsters, motorcycles and sports cars
competed at the venue that also boasted grand-
stand seating, concession areas and parking for
15,000.
"It was kind of like a poor man's Riverside with
that great long front straight," said former racer
Tip McPartland. "A somewhat banked 'oval track'
turn, some tight switchbacks and a long run of
esses. Only the tight turns were before the es-
ses at Vacaville and after the esses at Riverside.
Also the oval track turn wasn't as banked, but it
was still very fast. It was a nice layout but the, uh,
'pavement' was very poorly maintained. It seemed
VANISHING VACA VALLEY
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