Word: speedways
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...CANADA, CALIF. In this luxuriant valley eleven miles north of downtown Los Angeles, residents are making a last-ditch stand against a proposed eight-lane speedway that would cut their community in half. Running east-west alongside the town's main thoroughfare, it would link up other northern suburbs but do nothing for the town itself, seems to La Canadans little more than a ruse to collect $60 million in federal grants. The highway department claims that the projected-population figures for La Canada by 1980 necessitate the freeway. Planning Consultant Lyle Stewart retorts: "This area is built...
...Texan who designed the Ford-powered Cobra, a solid contender in production-class races last year. Shelby spent 1,000 hours preparing for the race, figuring gear and axle ratios, tuning engines, using computers to help adjust the suspension to the track conditions at Florida's Daytona International Speedway. In the time trials, Mexico's Pedro Rodriguez won the pole position by clocking 113.7 m.p.h. in his V12 Ferrari prototype, and Shelby decided he needed a little strategy too. His plan: turn California's Dan Gurney loose in a Lotus-Ford sprint car as a "rabbit...
...Last year Ford laid out $5,000 per car souping up its racing engines, only to lose the "stock car" championship to Chrysler, which installed custom-built, $12,000 "hemispherical-head" engines in its Plymouths. That was too heady for Bill France, owner of Florida's Daytona International Speedway and president of NASCAR, who has the funny idea that somebody besides a factory ought to be able to compete in the contest. He banned the "hemi-head"-which put Chrysler in such a huff that it refused to race at all at this year's Daytona Speed Weeks...
...statement emphasized the beauty of the Cambridge road which the Massachusetts State Legislature threatens to turn into an "intolerable speedway." The doctors urged the construction of pedestrian pathways along the Charles River...
Whatever else it is-a proving ground for automobiles, a nostalgic bit of Americana-the Indianapolis 500 is mainly a dice with disaster. Drivers come and go, cars change, engines get bigger. The one constant is danger. In 54 years of Memorial Day racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 56 people have died. But nobody has to twist a driver's arm to compete. The prospect of instant fame and fortune is inducement enough -even though he knows, as Eddie Sachs once said, that "in the long run, death is the odds-on favorite...