Iowa Dragway/Humboldt County Dragway/North Iowa Dragway (Humboldt)

Newspapers called this the first sanctioned drag strip in Iowa, but the Sioux City strip had been NHRA-sanctioned since the mid-1950s. It opened under AHRA sanction on May 26, 1963, on land leased from Denton Myers, three miles east and half a mile north of Humboldt. George Drown and Louis Vaudt built and owned the 40-foot-wide, half-mile asphalt track, which ran a quarter mile with a quarter mile of shutdown. It started with 87 classes. Two thousand people watched opening day, when a dragster from Fort Dodge won top eliminator with a 10.20 at 158 mph.

Hot Rod listed it as NHRA-sanctioned in April 1968. It was called Western Dragway from 1967 to 1969. Bob Johnson managed it in 1968, and Jim Sturtezenburg ran it from 1968 to 1975. Don Prudhomme met Tom McEwen in a best-of-three match race on Saturday night, July 29, 1972, and Mickey Thompson appeared twice that year. John and Shirley Williams took over in 1975. After John died in 1989, Shirley ran it with her family’s help, and after she married Chuck Mortensen in 1991 the two ran it together until 2015. From 2015 to 2017 it went by Iowa’s Oldest Dragway. James Barhite and Dennis Quillen took over management at the end of 2017, and in 2018 it was renamed North Iowa Dragway, running under AHRA sanction.