Originally Posted by
Rick Hohwart
The Ranch Pit Shop in Pomona was previously Thorp Raceway.
I am not sure of the history of the Del Mar Track. It started as an on-road track then was covered with dirt. It was the Ranch Pit Shop Del Mar for a while and later E&L. I don't think it opened originally as "The Ranch".
The Del Mar facility did have the smallest indoor carpet track I'd ever seen. I raced on it once with 4-cell and did something like 90+ laps in 8-minutes.
I believe the Hot Trick guy was a Del Mar/San Diego local. Thanks to Hot Trick the derogatory term "Bucky" (not used much any more) was created.
During my time at E&L, it was a dirt oval, and then later a paved oval with some road in the middle. The dirt was in when the Landgraff car hit the scene, before it was the Dominator. They put off-road in where the Del Mar Skateboard Ranch sed to be. Interestingly, Surf & Turf has its own entry on a site that's sort of similar to what Bob is attempting here called Disappearing Places.
Here's the entry. I looked through the photos on
their site but couldn't glimpse the track in any of them. Bob, a section on your site dedicated to tracks that have come and gone could be really cool.
I don't remember an indoor track, just playing "Bad Dudes" and Mickey Thompson's off-road in the arcade.
I grabbed the street address off some vintage Hot Trick stuff I saw on eBay a while back that still had header cards. There were two different addresses, one was what looked to be a small store front in San Diego and the other was a duplex. Yay for cyberstalking 20+ years later.