BMX Racing History · Track File · Legend Bike Co

Ascot BMX: Racing on Hallowed Ground

Ascot Park was the most famous dirt in American motorcycle racing. The half-mile where the 110, the 405, and the 91 all run together. Where every flat-track legend of three decades ran the cushion on Friday nights. And for a stretch of the late 70s into the early 80s, the kids got their turn out there too. BMX at Ascot meant racing the same ground your heroes raced. Nobody who rode it forgot it.

The Kids on the Sacred Dirt

By 1977 the NBA was running BMX at Ascot. On May 15 that year the track hosted the final of the RC Cola/Two Wheelers Race of Champions, the closer of a seven-race series that ran across California and Arizona. John George walked out of that one with the 16 Expert win, the Open Pro win, the Trophy Dash, and the Overall. A day like that at a place like Ascot was a story you told for the rest of your life.

The track kept running into the NBL era. The NBL brought its Ascot National to Gardena on August 21–22, 1982. Ask anyone who rode it and they'll tell you the surface was the smoothest around — groomed the way only a professional speedway crew could groom dirt. More than one SoCal pro, Leo "Primo" Dano among them, counts Ascot as where their racing started. Rider memory also puts a stop of the NBL's War of the Stars tour at Ascot, and we flag that one as recollection until a race report turns up.

The Track in Its Day

Here's the part you won't find in the magazines, because I was there for it. Ascot was THE track in its day. The BMX program was run by a man everyone knew as Spike, and the track went through a few different layouts over the years — Spike kept rebuilding it. Its real job was bigger than any one layout. When Entradero shut down, Ascot became the main track the whole South Bay rode. And the South Bay was thick with tracks — Alpine Village, Harbor BMX, others — but Ascot was where everyone ended up. I rode them all, and I'm telling you it was Ascot.

What It Meant

Ascot's BMX years were short next to its forty years of motorcycles, but the address did something to you. The South Bay kids racing there were the same crowd riding Harbor BMX and the Torrance lots, and now they were on ground that Kenny Roberts and every grand national champion of the era had torn up. It stuck with me. Decades later I named a Supercross colorway "Ascot Brown" as a tribute to one of my favorite tracks from the early 80s. Some dirt stays with you.

The End

The BMX program wound down sometime in the 1980s. The last sanctioned national we can document is the NBL's, in August 1982, and I'd rather leave the end date open than invent one. Ascot Park itself ran until November 1990, closing after the 50th Turkey Night Grand Prix — the last of more than 5,000 main events on the most storied dirt in California.