For Dragsters, One Last Ride

Car buffs were strolling through the pits, giving a once-over to a hopped-up Chevy station wagon, ogling a dragster as long, low and aerodynamically smooth as the Nike swoosh. There were the "Shrek" car, with a picture of the cartoon ogre, "Numbskull Racing," "More Money Racing" and "Jungle Jim."

Their superheated engines left squiggles in the cool autumn air as they idled huppity huppita huppita . Pungent clouds of burned rubber drifted from the staging area where drivers spin their tires to heat them and make them stickier for better traction.

The beauty of the ripened fields and clear skies could not much elevate the appearance of the track. Telephone poles tilt every which way in a tangle of wires. Faded signs whisper their hand-lettered messages, and the pit's asphalt surface is as cracked and pocked as a desert floor.

"Nothing's really changed. Maybe the cars have gotten a little faster," Randy Herald said. Herald, 30, a roofer who lives in Monrovia, said he wanted his 14-month-old daughter to see the track before it was gone. His wife, Tracy, 34, wanted to taste one last chili-cheese hot dog from the refreshment stand.

"To me, it's a shame to see it go. It's like a historic landmark," Tracy Herald said.

In the center of the pits, Bill Miller was pouring high-priced ($4.50 a gallon), high-octane fuel into a 1965 Cobra convertible. His son-in-law, Bill Debley, 28, sucked on a cigar about two feet away.

"Look how wide those slicks are! Fourteen-inch!" said Miller, 60, admiring the wheels of a passing dragster.

On weekends, Miller, an Army veteran, and his son-in-law, an Elvis impersonator with a wind-blasted pompadour and long tapered sideburns, take turns driving the Cobra.

"They'll race anything up here," Debley said. "Last year we had a Gremlin up here."

"Ski-Doos," Miller said, meaning snowmobiles.

"And you'll have the junior dragsters," Debley said, vehicles that resemble a stiletto on wheels, built on lawn mower engines, that children 8 to 17 can handle.

"Have you seen the motorcycles run?" Miller said. "Some of them just stay on one wheel the whole way down, just young and crazy."