big car time

(The photo above came courtesy of the late Don Radbruch, a continuing source of inspiration for me. It is of the great Jimmy Wilburn who got his racing start in the Pacific northwest, even racing at Victoria's Willows in 1935. The clipping is from an old racing publication of that era, Coast Auto Racing.)

The "big cars" -- that'd be "sprint cars" to the rest of us so-called modern kids -- never raced all that much in the Greater Vancouver area. Our loss. (I suppose the racing at Hastings Park in the 1920s could be called big car racing.)

They did make it to Digney Speedway once in 1949 with most of the cars coming from Vancouver Island. (The winner was Bob Simpson in the second Jack Smith built rear-engined car.) Victoria was the hot bed of big car racing in the 1930s into the 1950s. Langford Speedway, about 8 miles north of Victoria was the track and featured some of the hottest shoes that the Pacific northwest had to offer.

South of the border Everett's Silver Lake Speedway, both of the Aurora tracks (Speed Bowl and Stadium), and further on south to Portland Speedway and Portland Meadows plus many other tracks, mostly half-mile horse tracks, featured the big cars.

Seems like I've been in recent contact with a number of descendants of racers from that early era. And that's great. I hope it continues.

Here's one of the mainstays of that big car era with quite a detailed racing biography up to that point of 1949: Art Scovell. (Scovell even made it to Vancouver with the midgets in 1937 for a series of indoor races at the annual summer fair.)