Half Moon Bay Drag Strip

The county board of supervisors let the Tri-County Drag Strip Corporation hold drag races, one meet at a time, at the Half Moon Bay airport 3.5 miles north of town. The opener, first set for May 3-4, 1957, was moved to May 18-19 and then rained out. The first race finally ran June 15-16, 1957, drawing 2,000 spectators on Saturday and 5,000 on Sunday to watch 350 entries in 55 classes. Car clubs from San Mateo, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties staged it, and Tony Waters beat Jay Cheatham for top eliminator with 9.9 seconds at 150 mph. The board granted a provisional permit for June 29-30 on condition of improvements, including a fence between the strip and the spectators, who stood 100 feet away. Race manager A. L. Caldwell said he’d also add a row of hay bales, a ditch and plowed ground between them. The group agreed to pay 24 police officers for crowd control and pay the county $300 for the airport.

Getting county permission for every race proved unwieldy, so the board looked at alternatives, including a temporary lease, and opened the operation to bids. Mario Aquilino of San Francisco, who ran drag races in Santa Rosa, outbid Tri-County and won a one-year contract for for-profit racing. The decision was controversial, and before Aquilino held a race the board reversed it and gave Tri-County a two-year lease to run the strip as a nonprofit, which a new state law allowed without bidding. Tri-County had to use its net proceeds to pay off $30,000 in engineering and grading debt, run at least 25 meets a year and pay the county $350 a day or 15 percent of gross receipts, whichever was higher. Once the debt was paid, net proceeds would go into a trust fund for airport improvements.

Racing resumed under the new contract on October 6, 1957, and the day went badly. George McMurry, a 26-year-old high school teacher married just a month, was killed when his dragster overturned on a solo time trial as his wife watched. Jay Cheatham took top eliminator that day with 10.17 at 128.38 mph. Hank Vincent set a track record of 9.40 in his Chevrolet-powered dragster on September 14, 1958, and Al Hubbard set a class mark of 158.17 mph. In late May 1959, Tony Waters ran 8.73, which strip officials claimed as a world record.