City of Speed: Los Angeles and the Rise of American Racing - Hardcover

Los Angeles is the City of Speed. For decades, stretching back to the early 1920s, L.A. and Southern California have offered up the fastest, bravest, craziest race drivers; ingenious, madman car builders; and ego-inflated promoters all setting the pace for American racing. Regardless the venue—drag strip, Bonneville, road race course, Indianapolis, Supercross arena, dirt track, NASCAR oval—L.A. always had the hot driver, the demon tweak, or the unanticipated angle to leave the competition gasping to keep up.

No American city opened its arms and embraced the automobile like Los Angeles. But for L.A. the car was always more than basic transportation. From the days of Ford’s Model T right through today, Los Angeles and Southern California have been all about speed, racing, and building performance in a thousand ways that no one else in the country ever imagined. When L.A.’s racers and car builders decided to storm Indianapolis and its seminal 500 in the frantic 1920s and 1930s, their super-advanced race cars and cocky drivers blew off everything in their path. The disgruntled competition cursed the whole L.A. race colony as “those damn cowboys out of California.”
Little did they know that still more speed-obsessed cowboys were queuing up hundreds deep in the City of Speed. Seemingly unfettered by conventional notions about what a car should be or do, L.A.’s speed freaks were busily introducing hot rodding, land speed racing, the performance industry, drag strips, and countless other gearhead enterprises. Throughout the twentieth century, Los Angeles would assert itself as America’s absolute mecca of speed.
Joe Scalzo’s City of Speed is the first book to explore the huge influence of L.A.’s racing culture and its personalities on all of motorsports. Its fantastic tale is illustrated with historic photography, much of it previously unpublished.
Los Angeles’ racing history is America’s racing history.