Louisiana State Fairgrounds (Shreveport)

In 1957, big stock car races around the country started adding drag races to draw on their popularity. At the Louisiana State Fairgrounds, the drags ran on the straightaway of the half-mile dirt oval. The first may have been April 14, 1957. By 1958 the races used only a 50-foot stretch of the front straight, and ads said they were for local cars only, since organizers didn’t want fast out-of-town cars on the short strip. Drag races on Saturday night, April 11, 1959, before the next day’s Pelican 300, went well enough that a two-night program followed on May 10-11 with the Gulf States Championship 200. In 1971 the fairgrounds strip took the name Shreveport Dragway. Newspapers described the half mile as a fast hard-surfaced track and said the races were much shorter than a quarter mile. They were under an eighth. The dirt oval is gone from the fairgrounds today.