Downhill Racers

As scattered parents looked on and puzzled neighbors poked their heads out their doors early Sunday, nearly four dozen children in kayak-shaped cars raced down a quarter-mile stretch of Broadway in the first official All American Soapbox Derby in South-Central Los Angeles.

Hunched low in the cockpits of their plastic, gravity-powered race cars with helmets fastened, 44 children hurtled down the pavement at speeds of up to 35 mph.

“It’s really fun!” said 9-year-old Chris Alvarez, who sat behind the wheel of a car dubbed the Temecula Screaming Chicken after a dish served at its sponsor’s restaurant. “It’s bumpy.”

Like most of the children entered in the rally, Alvarez spent hours assembling and testing the car with a volunteer mentor. Many of the mentors came from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which started the county’s only soapbox car franchise four months ago. With more than 30 members, it is perhaps the fastest-growing franchise in the nation, sheriff’s officials said.

But in a sport that has largely become the bailiwick of suburban fathers and sons with the financial resources to develop an expensive hobby, the sheriff’s franchise is promoted as a positive outlet for children in lower-income neighborhoods, where the threat of gang violence is a fact of life.

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Many of the competitors boast good grades and consistent school attendance.

“This is not intended to be a reclamation program,” Deputy Richard Saunders said. “We want to just impress upon kids to stay on the right track.”

The race drew a few out-of-town competitors who own their own cars, but most were South-Central residents who drove cars purchased by corporate sponsors or civic organizations for about $450 each.

The sheriff’s franchise held a race in West Los Angeles in February, and plans to hold another in Dominguez Hills in July to qualify youngsters for a national competition.

The cars in soapbox races come in pieces. Children and their mentors assemble the frame, axles, wheels, steering mechanism and brake, which takes about a week. And then comes the detail work, when the children turn the cars’ ordinary plastic exteriors into sleek machines with stripes, NASCAR decals or nicknames like “Pink Cadillac,” and the accompanying flamingo-colored paint job.

For 13-year-old Konwre Gordon, the race was a chance to enjoy the sunshine without having to worry about what color she was wearing.

The constant threat of violence, said the Vanguard Learning Center eighth-grader, “is ruining our fun. It’s hard living out here.”

Gordon said the experience of building a soapbox car has piqued her interest in engineering, a field she hopes to pursue in college one day. For the moment, however, she was content to revel in the competition on Broadway near 130th Street, where the cars were launched from a ramp and stopped at the end of the raceway by their brakes or, if all else failed, bales of hay.

“At the beginning, you go, like, real slow,” said Brittani Norville, 8, a third-grader. “Sometimes it’s kind of fun to go into the hay.”

Norville, whose car was sponsored by the Lynwood Rotary Club, finished second. The first-place winner, Scott Toma of Gardena, races for the Ventura franchise. Then there were the Patterson boys, Glen and Stuart, who were driven from Hesperia to Los Angeles with their cars by their father, Jay, a Northrop mechanic.

Actually, “girls are usually better,” Jay said. “They’re more studious.”

Their natural disadvantage notwithstanding, the Patterson boys have competed on a race circuit that has taken them to Kingman, Ariz., Phoenix, Las Vegas, Oceanside and Ventura.

The idea is to collect enough points with solid finishes at each race to win an invitation to the national championship races, held in Akron, Ohio, where winners receive savings bonds and other prizes. Sunday’s race also afforded his family a chance to see a neighborhood they had never visited.

“It gives you a chance to see where they’re coming from,” he said of the local competitors.

The best racers from South-Central Los Angeles may also get a chance to see neighborhoods far from their own. Sgt. Howard Brust, a veteran racer, started the Los Angeles Soapbox franchise after coaching a 9-year-old Los Angeles boy through a race in San Bernardino and taking him to the national competition--a feat he hopes to repeat this year.

Said Brust: “These yuppies get out of their $40,000 Volvos with their lacquered [soapbox] cars. We’ll take these kids down there and kick their butts.”