POC History In The Rearview Mirror By Don Kravig, Precision Motion
Last month, we promised a journey through some of the famous race tracks the POC has competed on in the past that no longer exist. For those of you who visited Auto Club Speedway at what may be our last official event 3 weeks ago...you know just how much fun high speed banking is. There is no feeling quite like coming in at high gear at full throttle, setting up for the corner and letting the drift at the exit catch you, hopefully just before the wall. All this without ever lifting!!! I will never forget my first shot at banking at old Ontario Motor Speedway in 1973. But before we go there, let’s go way, way, way back. As most of you know the POC was founded in 1955, and is the oldest Porsche based car club in North America, and for all I know perhaps the whole world. The first couple of years featured monthly get togethers and guest speakers such as Phil Hill, Richie Ginther, Scooter Patrick, Davey Jordan, and many other well known pros at the time. By 1957, the early Porsche racers were competing at Paramount Ranch, Santa Barbara Airport, Pomona and many other local venues which were all basically public roads that were set up with hay bales and snow fencing to provide a race course. Our oldest living member, Michael Hammond (The Legend) recalls a race at Pomona that drew 30,000 spectators. And oh, by the way he was shunted off by Ken Miles (of Ford vs Ferrari fame) in that race. So maybe we should go even further back and just describe the sport as it was originally founded. Road racing in the 50’s was just that, racing on public roads, as there were no “purpose built” venues at that time. The most famous of these races was probably the Pebble Beach race through the Del Monte Forest using part of the 17 mile drive. This race drew virtually every famous driver of the time, and massive quantities of spectators. 48
