Greenville Drag Strip/Raceway Park

In early 1965, and probably for a year or two before, the Delta Angels raced on a narrow access road at the Greenville Industrial Fill. Reporter John Childs called it unsafe, with less than a foot between spectators and the strip and some fans wandering onto it (Greenville Delta Democrat Times, Feb. 1, 1965). In February 1965 the club asked the city council for a sanctioned strip at the municipal airport, and the council agreed a sanctioned operation there would be better supervised and safer. The airport, southeast of Greenville, dated to World War II, went civilian after the war and stopped operating as an airport between 1962 and 1967. Racing moved to its former Runway 4, 4,000 feet of asphalt.

The first airport race ran April 18, 1965, with almost 2,000 at the grand opening. New timing gear was in place on July 18, when 1,500 spectators saw Reynolds & Simpson’s ‘Orange Peeler’ from Shreveport win top eliminator. On Sunday, March 20, 1966, 1,203 spectators watched 73 entries, and NHRA’s Buster Couch offered safety suggestions. At an NHRA meet on August 7, 1966, before 3,000 people, John Hughes of Atlanta set a strip record of 7.81 and 202.70 mph in his fuel dragster. John F. Rose, Leroy Black and Sterling Long filed incorporation papers for Greenville Drag Strip on March 30, 1967, apparently a formality. In 1971 the Washington County supervisors leased the old airport to that year’s operators, A. D. Felts and George Baroni. Vic Fava was owner and promoter in 1973, and by 1997 it was called Greenville Raceway Park. The site is now a recreation complex with ball fields and livestock pens, and the old runway strip has been torn out for baseball diamonds.