Mid-America Dragway (Arkansas City)

Organized drag racing at the old Strother Field #2 airfield, about 6.5 miles west of Arkansas City, began in 1956. At least seven years passed before it came back to the old Strother auxiliary field. A big crowd reportedly watched drag races at South Landing Field on Sunday, June 21, 1964. In 1965 the Ark City Jaycees sponsored AHRA-sanctioned racing, including an AHRA divisional race on May 2 where Cody Parr of Oklahoma City set an AHRA world record in A/R. Dick Harrell met Billy Parker of Amarillo in a match race on October 10, 1965. The strip was called Ark Valley Dragway by 1966, if not earlier, and Harrell came back to race Chuck Grimsley’s Dodge on April 17, 1966.

From 1968 to 1970 it was Cherokee Strip Dragway under AHRA sanction, managed by Jim Miller, Bill Welton and Bob Gilmore, though Hot Rod’s January 1969 issue listed it as NHRA-sanctioned. It was Ark Valley Drag Raceway in at least 1971 and Cowley County Drag Strip in 1973. The airfield closed to planes around 1974-75, and sometime after that the strip became Mid-America Dragway. NHRA sanctioned it by the early 1990s or before. On August 20, 1994, Tony Wilson, 24, of Bentley, was killed on his motorcycle. The track apparently let anyone use the strip after a race as long as they didn’t race, but Wilson was racing a young man from Wichita at over 100 mph when he collided with a 10-year-old Oklahoma boy, who wasn’t seriously hurt. The strip closed after the 2011 season when the farmer who owned the land and the track owner couldn’t agree on terms. A few years later Jim and Chris Maybrier bought it from the farmer’s family and reopened it under NHRA sanction in 2018.