The Passing Parade

The "parade lap" before the start of a Pine Brook main event, circa 1970.  We guess 1970 because Larry Michaels' car (#39, outside of the third row) has a roll cage, while no other car in the shot is so equipped.  Roll cages were being phased in at the time.  (Click the photo for an enlarged view.)

Weekly feature races at Pine Brook were 35 laps in distance and started 16 cars.  18 cars would start the extra-distance races that punctuated the racing season.  In the track's later years, during the promotional tenure of Jack Bellinato, sometimes 20 cars would take the green.

The group of people at the upper left of the shot are gathered around a table on the roof of the box office building.  That rooftop is what passed for a "press box" at Pine Brook.  No one brought their car to the races in an enclosed trailer, either.  Simpler times...

This is a Dave Innes photo from the collection of Gary Mondschein.

Jaws 02

In this shot from Jeff Scott’s SpeedwaySnapshots.com web site, Tony Romit is getting ready to be pushed off in the Wehrle #02 on a Friday night at Pine Brook circa 1972.  This was the year that the race car sported the "shark's mouth" paint job around the radiator opening.  Can't you just hear that distinctive music from the movie Jaws?

That's John Wehrle walking alongside the right-rear tire, while the Fisher Automatic Transmission Service push truck goes by on the inside.

Lining up behind Romit in the #60 upright is Bob Cicconi.  Bob Cicconi would soon add his name to the list of winners at Pine Brook, although not in this car.

Spy in the Sky

The first space satellite was launched several years before the Pine Brook Stadium was built, but the sort of satellite technology that today serves civilians with GPS directions and online maps was not readily available until several years after the track closed.

Here is a Google Earth satellite image of the Pine Brook track from April, 1995, nearly six years after the last race was run, on which the outline of the racing surface is clearly visible.

Click the photo for an enlarged view.

Route 46 is the road extending from the lower left to the upper right, and Bloomfield Avenue is the road across the lower portion of the photo. The warehouses of the Pio Costa industrial park are at the right, across the Passaic River behind the track. These were built on land that was largely vacant – and largely what today we would call “wetlands” – when the track was constructed.

To the left, across Route 46 from the track, we can easily see all the junk cars at G.I. Auto Salvage, which was there before and after the track but which today is gone.

The track office was still standing when this photo was taken, as was the “powerhouse” along the backstretch, but everything else was gone. The bleacher seats disappeared within weeks of the track’s closing in 1989, and the guardrail and the light poles went away soon afterward. At some point before this photo was snapped the rest room building outside of turns three and four was demolished and the old backstage building in the pits, behind the powerhouse, was torn down by this time also.

Now, take a look at this satellite photo, from 2010:

The Home Depot has been built, and the G.I. Auto Salvage property is in the midst of being cleaned up, but the surrounding area looks were much the same.

Long Before Digital Photography

A simply great shot from Jeff Scott’s SpeedwaySnapshots.com web site. Black and white, grainy, blurry and soooo evocative!

Click the image for an enlarged view.

If you were never at Pine Brook this was taken from the spectator seating, looking into turn one.

The only car recognizable is Jim Gosford’s 61. The rest of them are pure art.  A great photograph from a time when you did not know what kind of shot you had until you went home and into the darkroom to develop the film and print the image.

Just Stand There

This grainy and scratched print is from 1968 or 1969.  (Click the photo for an enlarged view.)

Joe Lacy (18) is spinning into the fence and Jerry Stover (25) may or may not be spinning out also.  Exiting stage left, in the Pouleson 7o7, is Len Duncan.

Even though persons in the pits could stand right alongside the fence, in all the years at Pine Brook, only one person in the pits was ever injured.  Which, in hindsight, seems amazing.

Name That Driver

Who is this?  (Click the photo for a larger view.)

Time’s up.

It’s Bobby Courtwright (the younger), one of two racing sons of Bobby Courtwright (the elder), photographed behind the wheel of George Verhoest’s #59 at Pine Brook.

Billy Courtwright is his brother and is generally more well known to Pine Brook expats because he raced there more frequently and won there more than a few times. Billy is still in New Jersey and is still active in racing as a crew member, but these days Bobby lives in Georgia and still races, in 360 sprints and vintage modifieds.

Bobby’s non-racing weekends are spent volunteering at Feathered Friends Forever, America's largest rescue for endangered and exotic parrots. Feathered Friends Forever is operated entirely by unpaid volunteers and is funded only by private donations. You can check out the web site here, and Bobby isn’t shy about stating that more support is needed!

Exactly 50 Years Ago

It was Friday, July 6, 1962, when the Pine Brook Stadium opened its gates for the first time.

Bob Dini -- yes, D.I.R.T. followers, that Bob Dini -- was the winner of Pine Brook's first main event that night.

The headlines said that 3,500 people were in attendance, and while that was a bit of Nat Kleinfield's PR puffery, it reallywas not off by much.

What the news clipping at left does not report is who finished in any of the runner-up positions.

Click on the image of the newspaper clipping for a slightly enlarged view.