For years, the reports of Riverside International Raceway’s demise had proven premature. Yet when the tough, mean, dirty, hot, dusty, windy, nasty, miserable ol’ place in the California desert was finally declared terminal, it seemed like every sanctioning body in the western hemisphere decided to put on the “last race.” But the really and truly final road-race meeting, the last ever on Riverside’s road course, was for vintage cars on the weekend of July 16-17. The last race of that weekend was a two-hour enduro for a mixed bag of old sedans and sports racing cars.
The weekend, organized by Vintage Racing, or V.R., as it’s called, seems in retrospect as good a way as any to close out the track. In a kind of ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust way (and there…