Cedars Dragway (Dominique)

Wayne O’Grady built this strip 25 miles west of Montreal. Its opening date is unclear, but Don Dolmetsch remembered first racing at Cedres in July 1966, when starts were still flagged. When the Christmas tree arrived, he said, the racers felt like they’d turned pro. He recalled a final Top Eliminator race between a 1950s Hudson stocker and an orange small-block Chevy gas dragster. The time handicap came from measured distance charts, so the Hudson had 75 feet to cover against the dragster’s full quarter-mile. The flagman stood at the finish line, and the announcer played it up in both languages. The dragster caught the laboring Hudson and won, signaled by the flag girls, who stepped out from behind the finish-line boards on the winner’s side and waved a big flag.

One 1968 newspaper reported a grand opening on May 19, 1968, though that may have been the season opener. It featured a match race between the altereds of Gordie Coates and Jay Miner. The strip reportedly had two lanes separated by a grassy ditch and a two-story timing tower. Trophies were given out weekly but had no inscriptions. O’Grady shut the strip in 1969 when competition from bigger tracks took its toll. In the 1970s the Funny Street Car Club of Valleyfield ran the races, with Bob Bannon as tech inspector. The track was getting rough, and racers tried to buy it so they could fix it up. One said a price had been agreed, but when it was time to sign, the owner doubled it because he thought a meat processing plant would buy. The plant bought on the next road instead, and the owner ran a bulldozer through the place and removed the topsoil. He dug a ditch across the strip in 1980, which ended racing.