Hudson Drag Strip
ClosedClosed No longer racing, but some of the track is still there.
- Closed after 1994, blamed on greed and a family feud dating to about 1981
- Raced
- 1956-94
- State
- North Carolina
- What's left
- You can still spot it in aerial photos, or broken pieces of the track surface remain.
- Raced on
- Built as a drag strip
- First race
- about 1956
- Last race
- 1994
- Track
- 1/8 mile; longer, nearly 1/4 mile, before the 1970s
- Surface
- Dirt the first year, later paved
- Location
- Hudson
- People
- George Shell, incorporator (1959)
- Elevation
- 1,409 ft (430 m)
- Coordinates
- 35.87331, -81.47082
Walt McIntyre listed Hudson among the strips he raced. George Shell filed incorporation papers for Hudson Drag Strip on May 14, 1959, but it was open before then. Van Abernethy thought it was built in 1956 and ran until 1994, never reopening for 1995. He said it was dirt the first year and wasn’t always an eighth mile. Until about the 1970s it was longer, though not quite a true quarter, with races run to about the bottom of what was called shutdown hill. He blamed greed and a family grudge going back to around 1981 for closing it for good, and said a more loved track would be hard to find. Another old-timer’s father, who raced there, agreed 1956 sounded right and also remembered racing all the way to the bottom of shutdown hill.
A man who went as a boy remembered being there nearly every Saturday night from age 5 to 13 or 14, sitting on the hill at the starting line with his parents and arriving by 4:00 to watch the cars come in. Regulars included Hood, Mauney, Frank Teague, Sam Snyder and Danny Dunn, with Walter Henry and Terry Adams there about once a month. He recalled Eddie Carmichael bringing his Pro Stock Monza to test and shaking the door off it on the first pass.
