by waaytoomuchintothis » Mon Jan 06, 2014 5:46 pm
Yeah, only the rich guys in California trailered their cars in. It wasn't because they weren't street legal, it was for status. There are so many old pictures of Cadillacs and Lincolns pulling a Mercedes or Ferrari or Corvette or Maserati. In the Deep South, it was a pickup truck, dragging an Austin Healy Bugeye Sprite or an MG on a trailer with hay bales or chicken boxes, all on the way to the State Fair. There was a great SCCA track in Stuttgart, Arkansas, but there were smaller, impromptu tracks all over.
Lots of former WWII practice airfields were converted to race tracks especially for State Fairs. The design of these tracks frequently was a concrete straight, with either a graded road course, or a concrete straight with an asphalt semi-circle. The old airfields were a circle with an "X" pair of runways that divided the circle. When the airfields reverted to farmlands, the farmers could be coaxed into leaving some portion of the old airfield to be leased to a race organization or aviation use. Nowadays, with most of the farmland in the US owned or leased by corporations, this would be impossible. They own our land, they own our food. Family farms are becoming very rare.