Kingdon Drag Strip (Lodi)

History

Billy Hunefeld of Stockton signed a three-year lease to open this strip, with races run and sanctioned by the Valley Timing Association. For a very short time it was called the Franklin Drag Strip. First-year newspaper directions put it on an airstrip near Lodi, nine miles north of Stockton just off Thornton Road, marked by a long row of silos beside the strip. According to Don Jensen’s interview with Bob Cress, who managed the races for more than twenty years, the first race was on Memorial Day 1951. A race on November 11, 1951 drew 96 entries and 900 spectators, and Ray Righetti of Stockton had top speed at 114 mph in his roadster. Races usually ran on the second and fourth Sundays of the month, and in winter the track lit bonfires to keep fans warm.

In its first year the Valley Timing Association barred women from racing. It lifted the ban in 1952 but only let women race other women. The Torquers Auto Club of Sacramento helped run races in 1952. Early photos appeared in Hot Rod Magazine in March 1952 (pages 40-41) and August 1953 (page 54). The strip began timing both elapsed time and speed on November 7, 1954. In July 1956 it shut down in mid-month because of extreme heat. Don Jensen crashed his twin-engined dragster here in 1957. At the Northern California Drag Championships on June 1, 1958, Hank Vincent set a world record for Chevy-powered dragsters at 161.87 mph. The November 15, 1959 race was the first on new asphalt.

At the 1964 Northern California Championships, Don Garlits lowered the NHRA elapsed time record to 7.67 seconds but hurt his back doing it. He said the end of the strip was very bumpy, and on one run the jolt of the parachute opening, combined with the bumps, crushed three of his vertebrae. In 1995 Dave Arnaise, a co-owner of the airport, let racing return for one day a year. By 2006 it had grown into a weekend event called Return to Kingdon. In 2023 more asphalt went down and racing went from an eighth mile to a full quarter mile.