Houston County Dragway/Warner Robins Dragway

A $4,000 purse was offered for a two-day race on June 18-19, 1966, advertised as the biggest race ever held in Georgia, and Jimmy Nix was among the entries. The track ran under NHRA sanction on the first and third Sundays by 1967, if not earlier, with Troy Shuttlesworth as manager that year. On November 5, 1967, Sammy Joe Hood was killed in a match race when his 1965 Barracuda funny car hit a wall at about 150 mph and tumbled end over end.

A man who raced there while stationed at Robins Air Force Base after his Vietnam tour said the owner was Bobby “Waterboy” Boyd, who earned the nickname after nearly a whole season was rained out. Past the shutdown area was a farmer’s soybean field that caught any car that couldn’t stop. When Radici & Wise ran, the farmer would sit on his tractor out in the field waiting, and charge $10 to pull Radici back onto the track. The joke was that Radici went into the beans so often he’d bought the farmer a new tractor. Today’s Jerry Barker Drive covers the old track’s east end, where the finish line and shutdown were.