Excell-a-Rating Drag Strip/Little Rock Drag Strip/I-30 Raceway

Old-timers recall a quarter-mile drag strip near Benton, on the west side of I-30, just northwest of the old Benton Speed Bowl (now I-30 Speedway). More precisely, it was in the small community of Red Gate, on the south side of Stagecoach Road just southeast of Forest Hills Memorial Park cemetery. Benton is about fifteen miles southwest of Little Rock. The Swedish magazine Start & Strip listed it as Little Rock Drag Strip in a 1968 list of 325 U.S. drag strips. Very little else is known. On June 21, 1959, Jimmy Camp, 20, of Little Rock, was killed when his roadster went off the end of the track at an estimated 105 mph. On July 19, 1959, Bobby Langley set a track record of 159 mph, and national records fell in two classes that day. On September 15, 1962, Thomas Burris, 27, died instantly when his B altered left the track and hit a tree. Newspapers called it Little Rock Drag Strip and put it ten miles south of Little Rock, the same distance given in Camp’s accident. By 1970 at the latest, a trailer park creeping onto the southwest corner of the track had ended quarter-mile racing, and it ran as an eighth-mile through at least 1977. The 1977 NHRA Drag Strip Guide listed it as I-30 Raceway, NHRA-sanctioned, at the County Line Road exit on I-30, with Tom Parker as manager. A mobile home park and Pulaski Technical College now cover the site.