09/07/2026
Who would like to have seen the likes of Phil Hill, Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles racing Jaguars, Porsches and Ferraris through the hills of Torrey Pines?!
Before the golf carts, Ferraris ran on that bluff. 🏁
From 1951 through 1956, the abandoned service roads of Camp Callan — the Army's anti-aircraft training base on the Torrey Pines mesa, which operated from 1941 to 1945 and was dismantled afterward — became one of only two genuine seaside road courses on the West Coast. The other was Pebble Beach. The circuit ran roughly two and a half miles of cracked pavement, marked out with hay bales, rope and wooden stakes, with the Pacific over the drivers' shoulders and Torrey pines on the rim.
The entry lists read like a hall of fame. Phil Hill, Carroll Shelby, Ken Miles, Pete Lovely, John von Neumann, Jack McAfee. Allards, Jaguars, Porsches and Ferraris sliding past spectators who stood on ice plant behind a single rope. Crowds ran as high as thirty-five thousand people.
Racing didn't end because of a crash or a lawsuit. In 1956 the city set aside about a hundred acres of the old base for golf. William F. Bell Jr. finished the seaside courses his late father had envisioned, and Torrey Pines Golf Course opened in 1957.
The same ground that now hosts major championships once hosted open-cockpit roadsters at full throttle, six summers running.
