This is the coolest silent move that I have ever seen. The footage was taken on the opening day of the now gone Riverside International Raceway in California and it features some of the coolest road racing iron ever built. There are multitudes of Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes, and home built special cars featured in this one and the video from the pits shows all the racers in their period suits with old trucks and spectator cars. There’s nothing like cool old racing videos but one like this that documents the opening of what became one of America’s most famous race track. Riverside was home to everything from impromptu drag races, road races, off road truck events, NASCAR contests, and more through its history. It operated from 1957-1989 and was replaced by a damned shopping center. As you’ll see in this video, there wasn’t anything but dirt and emptiness around the track on opening weekend. Sprawl killed it.

Back to the happy stuff, though. The parts of this video I enjoyed the best were taken when the cars were off the track being serviced by their crews. Unlike hot rodders of the day, these road racing guys wore coveralls, had big tow rigs, and generally were doing very well financially. Just because it was 1957 doesn’t make Ferrari’s cheap! I went numb trying to total up the millions that this collection of vintage cars would bring at auction of in someone’s private collection. There are little Porsche 550 Spyders here, languid Ferrari, Maserati, and other Italian makes, and most importantly a brief appearance by the famous “Ol’ Yeller” of Max Balchowsky, which was a Buick Nailhead powered home built “special” that Max used to hammer the guys in the big buck foreign cars. That car is one of the coolest American road racing cars of all time and it got a lot of straight line hot rodders hooked on the idea of hitting the road course. Balchowsky went on and built a second “Ol’ Yeller”, again Buick Nailhead powered but with a better chassis and continued to take on all comers.

THIS IS AMAZING RACING HISTORY! VINTAGE CARS AND THE OPENING DAY AT ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS LOST TRACKS! HOW DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?!