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 collide, where every flat-track legend of three decades ran the cushion. And for a stretch of the late 70s and early 80s, the kids got their turn. BMX at Ascot meant racing where your heroes raced. Nobody who rode there forgot it.

The Kids on the Sacred Dirt

By 1977 the NBA was running BMX at Ascot, and on May 15, 1977 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 triple at 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. Riders remember Ascot as the smoothest surface around, groomed the way only a professional speedway crew could groom dirt, and more than one SoCal pro — Leo "Primo" Dano among them — counts Ascot as the track where their racing started. Rider memory also puts a stop of the NBL's War of the Stars tour at Ascot; we flag that one as recollection until a race report surfaces.

The Track in Its Day

Here's the part you won't find in the magazines, from someone who rode 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 its years — Spike kept rebuilding it. Its real role was bigger than any single layout: when Entradero shut down, Ascot became the main track the whole South Bay went to. And the South Bay was rich with tracks — Alpine Village, Harbor BMX, and more — but Ascot was where everyone ended up. That account comes firsthand from Legend Bike Co founder Bill Ryan, who rode them all.

What It Meant

Ascot's BMX years were short compared to its forty years of motorcycles, but the address did something to you. The South Bay kids who raced there — the same crowd riding Harbor BMX and the Torrance lots — were racing on ground that Kenny Roberts and every grand national champion of the era had torn up on Friday nights. Supercross BMX founder Bill Ryan, who started racing in that era and that part of town, named a Supercross colorway "Ascot Brown" decades later as a tribute to one of his 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 we'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.