“We’ve all seen what racing on a city street ends up at; it’s either jails or hospitals at the end of the day, and we’re pretty big on safety. None of us are doing this to get rich. We aren’t doing this as a profession…everyone has a day job. And so we cater to the hobbyist, sportsman, club-type racing. Lee and Mary are talking about running ‘cash days’ and those types of things, and since the little sneak peaks have gotten out, we’ve already been approached by people in other states to come test,” Grana explains.
“We’re a rental facility, so if a club wants to come in, we’ll put together a day where they can come out in a controlled environment and they’ll be able to let their cars eat,” Grana says. “All the way up to the guys that want to test-and-tune to race for money. Previously, we’ve always used our runway prior for magazine testing and such. With Mary and Lee having a passion for the racing side of things, that’s where we’re kind of dipping our toe in the water. Anything is possible. Where it ends up, who knows. The right people in the right circumstances and the stars align, we’ll do anything that makes sense. But we walk before we run.”
California, the most populous state in the union by a wide margin, has seen the demise of countless drag strips throughout the sport’s history. Time and again, cities have encroached upon racetracks, and either government pressure, the mere value of the land for residential and commercial use, or a mixture of both has wiped them clean off the map. As a result, the most densely-populated area in the country is home to less than a handful of legitimate drag racing facilities, causing an uptick in illegal street racing.
And that’s where Grana and the Baltzell’s have the upper hand. Chuckwalla is located 180 miles from Los Angeles city center, but its position is so remote that its nearest neighbor is more than a mile away, and the possibility of residential encroachment is improbable, at best.
“It will be a long time before that happens. There’s a lot of solar energy production scheduled to go in out here, and solar generally doesn’t lend itself to people wanting to move in. But we’ve already met our requirements to the county to be a motorsports facility, and we passed the test of time with the noise that we produce.”
West Coast Street Outlaws racing is expected to begun in early 2020, but no event dates have been finalized at this time.