1954 Golden Gate Road Races Program – San Francisco Sports Car Racing

Description

This is the program from the final Golden Gate Park road-racing weekend, June 5–6, 1954, when sports cars raced on a roughly three-mile circuit laid out directly through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The short-lived races were held from 1952 through 1954 and attracted an extraordinary variety of machinery—Ferrari, Jaguar, Porsche, MG, OSCA and home-built American specials among them. The 1954 event included a young Ken Miles, later one of the legendary figures of American sports-car racing, driving the Mercury-powered Troutman-Barnes Special.

And the program itself is terrific. There’s a full two-page map of the Golden Gate Park circuit, along with period automotive advertising for Jaguar XK-120s, the Ford Thunderbird, Austin-Healey and Shell, plus wonderfully dated San Francisco advertising and promotions for other West Coast sports-car events. It captures that brief postwar moment when European sports cars, California hot-rod ingenuity and American road racing were colliding—and before racing through Golden Gate Park disappeared altogether. The surviving photographic record of the 1954 event includes everything from Ferrari 375 MMs to Kurtis specials and Ken Miles’s Troutman-Barnes machine.

A wonderful piece of early California sports-car history—and a program from the last time they ever raced through Golden Gate Park.