Cavern City Dragway/Pecos Valley Dragway (Carlsbad)
ClosedClosed No longer racing, but some of the track is still there.
- Tommy Ivo raced his four-engine dragster against his two-engine car on June 21, 1964
- Art Arfons ran the "Green Monster" jet dragster on July 25, 1965
- A $100 purse in 1957 clashed with NHRA's amateur rules
- Raced
- 1957, 1963-late 1970s
- State
- New Mexico
- What's left
- A good length of the old track surface is still there, in poor to good condition.
- Raced on
- An airport runway
- First race
- April 28, 1957 (scheduled)
- Last race
- probably late 1970s
- Location
- Old Cavern Highway, eight miles south of Carlsbad
- People
- Ted Atkins, operator (1957)
- C.W. Larrentree, operator (1957)
- Dennis Mahaffey, owner (1963-)
- Dirt Dobbers car club, operator on profit-sharing basis (1963-)
- Sanction
- AHRA, NHRA
- Elevation
- 3,196 ft (974 m)
- Coordinates
- 32.28499, -104.22551
This pin shares its exact coordinates with another strip in the source data, so it may be misplaced.
The first race at this strip eight miles south of Carlsbad on Old Cavern Highway was set for April 28, 1957. It had no official name, and Ted Atkins and C.W. Larrentree ran it, with races planned every Sunday and spectators paying $1. The first race paid $100 to the overall winner, which put off racers who wanted to keep their NHRA amateur standing. NHRA had written the operators that anyone racing for money on any strip could no longer compete as an amateur at NHRA tracks, and the Dirt Dobbers car club decided that probably kept them off the new strip. By 1958 the Dirt Dobbers were looking for a place to race again.
They didn’t get a permanent home until 1963, when Dennis Mahaffey bought an abandoned emergency landing strip on state land, paid to make it raceable and asked the Dirt Dobbers to run it for a share of the profits. After the June 16, 1963 race, newspapers reported many people got speeding tickets driving back to Carlsbad. Class winners got trophies, and it ran under NHRA sanction on the third and fifth Sundays. Carlsbad’s Dickie Harrell raced there often. On June 21, 1964, Tommy Ivo ran his four-engine dragster against his own two-engine car in an exhibition. AHRA divisional record runs were held on May 23, 1965, and Art Arfons ran his “Green Monster” jet dragster on July 25 that year. By 1966 it was called Pecos Valley Dragway, and it was on a 1968 list of 325 U.S. drag strips in the Swedish magazine Start & Strip. Racing probably stopped in the late 1970s.
