75-80 Drag-A-Way (Monrovia)

In July 1960 the Frederick County Appeals Board approved Chuck Wilcom’s request to build a drag strip on 33 acres of farmland where Maryland 75 meets Maryland 80, three miles south of New Market, as long as he built proper entrance and exit roads. He moved fast, and the grand opening was September 18, 1960, with Sunday races run and sponsored by the Maryland Timing Association. At first it was little more than a farm field with an asphalt strip down the middle.

One old-timer remembered a 1963 Wednesday night match race between Ronnie Sox and ‘Dyno Don’ Nicholson, said to be the first time Sox was paid to match race. The place was packed, and both ran white Z-11 Impalas. The return road was so rough that both cars drove back up the track after each run, with their fronts jacked up the way the hot setup called for then. He couldn’t remember who won the best of three, and years later both Sox and Nicholson told him they had.

A Frederick News Post article on the track’s tenth anniversary (July 30, 1970) described the early days as dusty and disorganized with almost no safety measures. A wire fence on each side, which fans flattened almost every week, was all that separated cars from spectators, and a flagman at the far end, sometimes shortsighted and sometimes fair, waved the winner’s lane. Ten years on, the pits were paved, the track had guardrails, chain-link fencing and electronic timing, and match races and exhibitions were frequent, with stars like Ronnie Sox, Phil Bonner and Dick Landy. NHRA sanctioned it in 1971.

The track closed in 2005 because owner Bill Wilcom planned houses on the 400-acre farm, but a building moratorium soon froze the plan. The land sat until 2009, when the strip reopened for a few more years before closing for good after 2013. In 2021 a group led by Roy Stanley, who owned the dragway, and Hurricane Racing Tours looked close to reopening it, but they didn’t get the permits to rebuild the strip and the county ordered the project stopped.