El Paso Dragway/Sun City Dragway/Thunder Alley Dragway

John Barnett built this strip some time after 1962 as a private airstrip for his plane, and it was called Hueco Airport. In 1968, after going to some auto races in Mexico, he decided to run drag races at the site. The 2,600-foot asphalt track opened on Sunday, August 17, 1969, with grudge races only. On August 24 class winners got trophies even though the track didn’t have timing clocks yet. Alan Culpepper was track manager and starting flagman. In that first season Carl Bennett set the track record of 8.15 seconds at 185 MPH in his Mustang funny car. Newspapers in 1970 named Don Lowdry and Bud Hargrove as co-owners.

Through the 1970s the track put on a busy program of funny cars, top fuelers, jet dragsters and wheelstanding exhibition cars. Little has been found about El Paso Dragway after about 1977-80. It was called Sun City Dragway in the 1980s and Thunder Alley Dragway at some point before the early 1990s, and in 1986 it was briefly West Texas Motorsports Park under owner David Gass. By 1996 it no longer doubled as a landing field and had been lengthened to 3,600 feet. It probably closed by the mid-1990s and sat dormant, reopened briefly around 2003, and likely closed for good around 2004. The record after 1980 is thin, so much of this later history is conjecture.