Garden City/Gallahads Drag Strip

The Gear Grinders car club was the first to drag race on this half-mile abandoned emergency airstrip on the Spikes farm, six miles northeast of Garden City on U.S. 50. It was the old Garden City Army Air Field No. 3, never used as a civilian field after the war, and today it’s a feed lot with only a few traces of runway left. The Gear Grinders held several races there in 1955, usually with about fifty cars. On July 17, 1955, they and a Garden City motorcycle club held a joint race with trophies in seven car classes and five AMA-sanctioned motorcycle classes.

In 1956 the Gallahads car club asked to use the Garden City airport. The city council said no, so the club raced on the old airstrip instead, with support from the Garden City police. At the first race, on June 17, 1956, 500 spectators watched eighty cars in nine classes, and the electric timer couldn’t register Don Pruitt’s fuel-burning 1948 Mercury on its 12.5-second run. Vandals burned the club’s new timing stand in July, but at least five races ran from June through September. About 3,500 people came to the 1957 opener on April 28 to see 95 entries. Lloyd Davis of Wichita won top eliminator in the Rose-Davis Special A/D at 12.40 and 116.88 mph, and the Kenz and Leslie Lincoln-powered 1932 Ford A/roadster from Denver ran 12.16 at 117.84.

On June 26, 1957, the city commission let the Gallahads try one race on an east-west runway at the municipal airport, the old Garden City Army Air Field southeast of town on U.S. 50, which they had wanted in 1956. It had three asphalt runways, the longest being two 3,000-foot north-south strips. After the trial the city approved more racing. An AHRA regional race at the Gallahad strip on August 18, 1957, drew 1,000 spectators and 84 cars from Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and Nebraska, and Chuck Kirgan of Denver had top speed at 113.06 mph in his 1934 Ford fuel coupe. A 1957 Garden City Telegram story said the Gallahads had sponsored races for six years, but no record backs that up. By 1962 the NHRA-sanctioned strip used a 5,600-foot concrete runway at the airport. After the Ford County Airport in Dodge City was sold, the American Motorcycle Association moved its annual National Motorcycle Rally to Garden City, and on Labor Day, September 2, 1963, over 200 racing motorcycles, about 75 of them drag bikes, raced on the Gallahad strip. The strip was called Garden City Dragway from 1964.