All photos courtesy Project Street Legal.
Terminal Island in the Port of Los Angeles didn’t play by the typical dragstrip operations manual. Intermodal shipping containers surrounded the strip and served as the basis for some of its structures. It had no national drag racing organization affiliation, and everybody pretty much run what they brung. It opened and closed nearly a dozen times over the course of three decades, and now, in the midst of an LAPD crackdown on street racing in the city, fans of the dragstrip are working to bring it back.
“Our main goal is to keep everybody off the streets,” said Donald Galaz, a lieutenant with the International Brotherhood of Street Racers and the founder of Project Street Legal, an initiative to return racing to Terminal Island. “But you know the way politics is – the wheels go very very slowly.”
Largely due to the efforts of Los Angeles street racing legend Big Willie Robinson and his wife Tomiko, Terminal Island opened in 1974 amid the industrial background of the port, far away from residential areas and off the increasingly crowded streets of Los Angeles. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it would close and reopen about 10 times, then reopen once more from 1993 through 1995 – again, through Robinson’s efforts – before seemingly shutting down for good. A coal facility took over the area once dedicated to the quarter-mile track east of Ferry Street, but in recent years that facility has closed, and the port has yet to find a use for the vacant space.
In the meantime, street racing and freeway-closing sideshows within Los Angeles have continued – sometimes with fatal consequences – and have as a result attracted increased attention from the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies in the area this summer.
Galaz, who recalls Tomiko greeting him when he visited Terminal Island in the 1980s and 1990s, said he spoke with Big Willie Robinson shortly before his death in 2012 and asked for Robinson’s blessing to keep fighting for the dragstrip on Terminal Island. “Big Willie said, ‘See what you can do, how far you can get,’” Galaz said.
He said he didn’t realize at first what exactly he was up against. Port officials initially had no intention of discussing the idea with Galaz or anybody else from Project Street Legal – even as late as August of this year, the port’s executive director outlined several reasons why he couldn’t sign off on a dragstrip on port property – but Galaz said he’s nothing if not persistent. He initially turned to politics, helping campaign for current mayor Eric Garcetti after Garcetti reportedly pledged to support the initiative (and has since petitioned Garcetti to throw his weight behind the project), and has since built support among the Los Angeles automotive and racing communities.
Phil Bowdoin, who has been working with Galaz and Project Street Legal, said the group has looked for other locations for a dragstrip as part of its effort to get racing off the streets, but hasn’t found any others sufficiently distant from residential areas and at the same time sufficiently close to the heart of Los Angeles.
“This land at the port is open and vacant,” he said. “The time to strike is now.”
In recent months, however, Galaz said he’s made some progress. Project Street Legal has secured the backing of race promoter Nate Jones of the Long Beach Grand Prix and has sat down for meetings with port authorities – the first such meetings in 20 years, he said. Earlier this month, Galaz met with Ronald Boyd, the chief of port police, to survey the location and to swap ideas about how to implement the track.
“I think what really turned them around was when Red Bull held its Global Rallycross event there recently,” Galaz said. “They saw the economic impact it created, and it really opened their eyes. That was just a three-day event; think about doing something like that every weekend.”
In addition, Galaz said that he has loftier ambitions beyond the return of racing to Terminal Island. “We want to use the car as a gimmick to engage with youngsters,” he said. “If we don’t engage with them – especially the at-risk kids – then they go down the wrong road. We want to incorporate a classroom aspect, put wrenches in their hands and make them into contributing members of society.”
For now, Project Street Legal has begun work on an organizational structure and business plan for their proposed 1/8-mile dragstrip, and its members have discussed the possibility of getting sanctioning from either the IHRA or NHRA. Galaz said he also intends to continue holding officials’ feet to the fire. “I’m gonna run these harbor people until they can’t run no more,” he said. “We’ll go down any avenue we can take to bring this to fruition.”
For more information on Project Street Legal, visit LAStreetLegal.org.
from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2014/12/31/los-angeles-street-racers-aim-to-bring-drag-racing-back-to-terminal-island/
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