Collette's Drag Strip (Dayton)

Newspapers say very little about this strip, but plenty of racers have written down their memories of it. The only news item found was about several concession workers arrested for selling beer to minors on April 8, 1962. Paul Dewey Collette apparently owned it. Reports put it 5 miles west of Dayton off Highway 90, and its remains still show in aerial photos five miles southwest of Dayton, just north of the highway. One racer said it was fairly short, with about 200 yards of paved shutdown before you ran onto dirt. More shutdown was paved later, but nobody mentioned that the loose pea gravel hadn’t been packed into the tar yet, and some people took wild rides that day. Another said his neighbor ran a ‘61 Corvette there and showed home video of nothing but a cloud of dust once the cars crossed the finish. A Beaumont racer ran his ‘55 Chevy there many times at 17 in the early ’60s, before going into the service in 1964, and saw a six-cylinder ‘55 Chevy, an I/G he thought, get loose at half-track and roll several times, with the driver taken away in an ambulance. One team that ran an X/MP sports car there five or six times took out the whole barbed wire fence at the end one Sunday and found the pea gravel too much to deal with. Ken Olson, who raced there a lot in 1960 and 1961, said it was easy for him since he had the only competition car, a B/A. He remembered a Cajun named Collette running the place, and racers downing a beer, making a run and hanging on in the gravel.