Abilene Dragway/Big Country Raceway

The paved strip, 70 feet wide and 3,800 feet long, sat on a mesa six miles south of Abilene on the west side of U.S. Highway 83, with another 1,500 feet of graded, unpaved shutdown. An unpaved road led in from the highway. A researcher who specializes in finding old strips placed it northeast of Bell Plains Road and County Road 336, parallel to the county road and about 250 feet east of it. Houses now stand next to what’s left of the track, and some outbuildings sit right on it.

Robert H. McDaniel Jr. owned and managed the NHRA-sanctioned strip when it opened on Sunday, October 18, 1964. The grand opening a week later, on October 25, had two match races, one between two fuel dragsters and one between Super Stockers Gene Snow and Kelly Chadwick. By 1966, when it was called Abilene Drag Raceway, Bobby Langley held the strip record at 7.7 seconds and 214.78 MPH. In 1968 O. B. Barrett, a drag racer who owned an Abilene body shop, bought the strip and renamed it Big Country Raceway, opening the season under NHRA sanction on July 14, 1968. On March 19, 1972, the Dyess Drag Club held its first meet at the strip, now called Big Country Dragway, focusing on bracket and grudge racing. It raced Sunday afternoons in winter through May and Saturday nights from early May to September. Steve Lindsey owned and ran it in 1973. On Saturday night, May 5, 1973, Pete Todoroff beat thirteen other Pro Stockers in his ‘72 Camaro and set a strip record of 9.99 at 138 MPH, and Andy White lowered the Pro Stock record to 9.74 in his Vega on Sunday, December 2, 1973.

Phil Nichols, owner of Rebellion Racing, Inc., leased and remodeled the track in 1974 and renamed it Steamboat Mountain Dragway. It opened on March 10, 1974, under NHRA sanction, racing the second and fourth Sundays in March and April. Nichols had raced for ten years and held seven AHRA world records at various times. He and his wife Shay made major improvements that year. Shay helped manage the track until her own pro stock racing career took too much of her time.