Entradero BMX: Ground Zero for the South Bay
BMX Racing History · Track File · Legend Bike Co
Entradero BMX: Ground Zero for the South Bay
This is the track I learned to ride on. The shortest pedal from my apartment to any track ran to the basin at Entradero, so that's where I went, over and over, until I knew it cold. Entradero is one of the most remembered tracks of 1970s South Bay BMX. And almost nothing about it survives in print. So I'll tell you what the record holds, and then I'll tell you what I saw with my own eyes.
Ground Zero
Entradero was ground zero for the BMX Action crew and for a whole lot of us. I'm not guessing at that — I was there. I'm Bill Ryan, and I grew up riding that basin. BMX Action's Torrance home base sat just up the road, and so did its famous test spot, the one everybody called "the Pit." The riders who filled those magazine pages rode this same dirt. The whole South Bay scene came through here — the same crowd I raced against at Ascot and the Harbor-area tracks.
My own story with the track is the story of a thousand other SoCal kids. It wasn't the first track I ever raced. But it's where I learned to ride, because it was the closest dirt to my front door, so I rode it constantly. Every neighborhood had a track like that. Mine just happened to be the one about to put BMX on magazine covers. And when Entradero shut down, the scene didn't scatter. It moved a few miles over to Ascot, and Ascot took over as the South Bay's main track.
What the Record Shows
A BMX track ran in the basin at Entradero Park in the 1970s. The clearest surviving printed record is a rider's firsthand account, with a photo, of his first race ever — Entradero Park, February 1977, won aboard a blue-anodized Race Inc. Entradero doesn't show up in the first track listings of the sport's earliest magazine in 1973–74, and it's gone from the rider-compiled rosters of the ABA era. That brackets its life to somewhere in the middle 1970s, finished before the 80s. Who built it, who sanctioned it, who ran the gate on Saturday mornings — that part isn't in the record yet.
One more page belongs to that record. Bob Osborn — founder of BMX Action and later BMX Action Trick Team — put it in writing himself in BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team (Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed; Wizard Publications, 1982): he recalls meeting a young Mike Buff at "the old Entradero Track" roughly three years before the book went to print, describing him plainly as "a fast 13 Expert." It's a small line, but it's a dated, first-person confirmation that the top BMX Action names were riding this exact dirt.
What We're Looking For
Race flyers. Trophies with the track name on the plate. Photos of the start hill. Moto sheets. Memories with dates attached. The people who raced Entradero are still out there — an active Entradero memories group on Facebook keeps the track's story alive — and this page exists so the record has a permanent home.
Raced Entradero? Legend Bike Co wants to hear from you. Every photo, flyer, and firsthand memory makes this page more complete — and gets the South Bay's track back into BMX history where it belongs.
Sources: Bill Ryan, firsthand — Entradero as ground zero for the BMX Action crew, his own years learning to ride there, and the scene's move to Ascot after the track closed; rider firsthand account with photo (February 1977 race, socaltrailriders.org); City of Torrance parks records (Entradero Park, 5500 Towers St.); Bicycle Motocross News early track listings via 23mag.com (absence noted); bmxmuseum.com Southern California track-history forum (absence from ABA-era rosters noted); the Entradero memories group on Facebook (community archive); Bob Osborn, BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team (Wizard Publications, 1982), for the Mike Buff anecdote. This page deliberately carries less than the others — a short true page beats a long guessed one.