Lakeland Dragway/Memphis-Shelby County International Raceway

This track, near Memphis at Interstate 40 and Canada Road, opened on July 4, 1960. Raymond Godman was the driving force behind it. A sniper’s bullet in the Korean War in 1951 had left him in a wheelchair, but he never let that slow him down. In 1955 he was running makeshift races with the Memphis Rodders car club at an airfield in Halls, and he soon became an NHRA advisor. As the crowds and car counts grew, he saw the need for a permanent track, found 128 acres in the small town of Lakeland and spent two years building the strip. He also fielded the popular “Bo-Weevil” dragster and funny car driven by Preston Davis.

In 1962 the strip was NHRA sanctioned and raced the first, third and fifth Sundays, and Hot Rod featured it in its October 1962 issue. In 1963 it raced every Saturday night. Over its 19 years it was also sanctioned by IHRA and AHRA and went by Lakeland International Raceway and Shelby County International Raceway as owners came and went. Two long-time owners were Bill Taylor and Larry Coleman of Taylor-Coleman and TCI Transmission, who kept improving the track with concrete guardrails, a road course and a spectator catwalk behind the staging lanes. The road course, built in the late 1960s, took in the drag strip. After a $500,000 remodel, the strip held its grand opening on May 13, 1969, with the AHRA Mid-South Spring Championships.

Jungle Jim, Dyno Don, Arnie “The Farmer” Beswick, Shirl Greer, Bob Glidden, Lee Shepherd, Shirley Muldowney, Tommy Ivo, Eddie Hill and Gene Snow all raced there. Don Garlits set an AHRA national ET record of 5.95 seconds there in 1972 and returned in 1973 to run 5.79, the quickest pass in drag racing at the time, a mark that stood with NHRA for almost two years. The track appeared in the 1971 cult film Two Lane Blacktop. On Saturday night, April 22, 1967, James Nevils was killed when his C dragster’s throttle jammed and he went 30 feet off a drop-off at the end of the track. On August 4, 1968, Gene McClanahan was killed when C. J. Kearney’s runaway dragster struck him at the end of the strip. The track was demolished in 2009 for a mixed-use industrial complex, but remnants remain. It still shows in aerial photos south of the Outlet Mall, parallel to Monroe Road and about 300 feet west of it.