DATE: Sunday, June 22, 1997                 TAG: 9706220243

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C8   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: FONTANA, CALIF.                   LENGTH:  106 lines

A RACING GEM, GONE TO GRASS DREAMS LIVED AND DIED AT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA'S ASCOT PARK, WHICH NOW IS JUST A FIELD.

Brad Noffsinger stopped by the old place the other day.

It once was a half-mile track in Gardena, built on a reclaimed landfill located where, as the radio ads used to say, ``the San Diego, Harbor and Artesia freeways slide.''

``It's grass,'' the crew chief of Wally Dallenbach Jr.'s No. 46 Chevrolet Monte Carlo said Saturday in the Winston Cup garage at the gleaming, new California Speedway. ``I drove by it the other day. It's grass! They ruined a good thing. Ascot was a great racetrack.''

Ascot Park was one of the most memorable and storied of America's short tracks. It featured anything and everything you could race on a nearly flat half-mile dirt track, but the regular weekend events showcased the non-winged midgets and sprint cars of the California Racing Association.

``She was the Darlington of sprint-car racing,'' Noffsinger said. ``Guys from all over the world would come and run Ascot thinking that the place was a real baby place - a piece of cake - and the next thing you know, they're sitting up there in the catch fence upside down.''

Noffsinger, 37, was one of Ascot's greatest drivers. From 1979 to 1991, he won 152 sprint-car races at Ascot, including 63 feature races.

I lived in Southern California during those same years, and for the last two or three, I was a regular at Ascot, too.

I'd sit up in the first turn, with a beer and one of Ascot's superb chicken pita sandwiches. We'd bring a pane of Plexiglas for my daughter to block the clods of clay kicked up by the roaring sprinters as they slid through the first turn.

Most nights, the marine layer of clouds would move in from the nearby Pacific Ocean and the track surface would become sticky - and the racing would be incredible.

``It had a clay surface,'' Noffsinger said. ``We called it `graveyard clay' because there was a graveyard across the street from the racetrack and they'd bring it from over there and pack it into the racetrack. You'd walk across it on a moist night and it would pull your tennis shoes off, even if they were tight on tight.''

Ascot was a family place. It was owned by the Agajanian family and run by Cary Agajanian, who is John Andretti's business manager. Noffsinger had his best years driving for the Jack Gardner family. Most of the sprint and midget teams were family-run operations.

Noffsinger himself was from a family of racers. He grew up in Huntington Beach, and at 16, he started racing the family midget car.

But Ascot had a mean streak. And when Dallenbach's Sabco Racing teammate Joe Nemechek suffered a family tragedy earlier this year when his younger brother, John, was killed in a racing accident, Noffsinger knew what Joe was going through.

``Ascot took a lot of drivers' lives,'' Noffsinger said. ``I lost my little brother there.''

It was Memorial Day 1983. Todd Noffsinger was 19. He had been racing two or three years.

``He probably would have been one of the best race-car drivers in the world,'' Brad Noffsinger said. ``He was a thinker.

``I had broken my car that night and I was standing about 50 feet from him. It was the best race of his career. He was running fourth in the main feature.''

When the crash started, Todd Noffsinger turned his car into the wall.

``Instead of driving through another car, he parked it into the fence and it just kinda rolled over,'' Brad said. ``I looked over and I could see he was all right. I started to head for him and someone grabbed me and pulled me back.''

Another driver who didn't see the accident or the red flags turned the corner and drove right through the roll cage on Noffsinger's overturned car. Todd Noffsinger died of a broken neck.

``I haven't really recovered yet,'' Brad said. ``I think about him every day. I've got a picture of him in my wallet. They buried him a week from that Saturday, and I kinda went over the deep end. I kinda went nuts for a week or two.''

But a friend talked with him and consoled him and brought him back to earth, and Brad Noffsinger went back to Ascot.

``I made it a point right then that I wasn't going to run into anybody. And within three weeks after I came back, I had won a handful of races,'' he said. ``I just kept winning and winning and winning and staying out of everybody's way. It was more determination, more desire and just thinking about racing the racetrack and not racing other cars.''

Noffsinger had NASCAR ambitions, and in 1988 he drove fellow Californian Mike Curb's Buick in the Winston Cup series. Then he returned to California for several more years of sprint and midget racing.

``At the end of 1992, I told 'em I was leaving California and I wasn't coming back,'' he said. He moved with his wife, Robin, and two children to Concord, N.C. He had a few more shots as a driver in Winston Cup, but when he got the opportunity to become Darrell Waltrip's spotter, he took the job so he could learn the tracks from above.

And when the opportunity came last year to become a crew chief for Sabco Racing and to learn more about the cars and the sport, he took that job.

Noffsinger hasn't given up his ambition to drive. And he still drives a sprint car from time to time. But his racing days at Ascot are over. It was razed at the end of 1991. Noffsinger won the final sprint-car race.

Something bigger and better was supposed to be built where Ascot stood. But like that other long-gone Southern California track, Ontario Motor Speedway, nothing was ever built in its place.

The land is vacant, and weeds grow at the place that holds so many bittersweet memories for the NASCAR crew chief who stopped by the other day just to see what was there. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Brad Noffsinger, now Wally Dallenbach Jr.'s crew chief, won 152

sprint races, and lost a brother, at Ascot Park, which was razed in

1991.

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