Madera Airport

The first drag race at Madera Municipal Airport was on June 13, 1954. On October 10, 1954 it hosted the NHRA-sanctioned California Championship Drag Races, run by the Madera Clutchers car club. Writing in Drag News on January 11, 1958, four years after the strip opened, Al Cardwell said the city was proud of the strip and the club, both officially and privately, and that it was a great place to race, with a good pit area, good tech inspection and a 4,000 by 150-foot runway with a good surface. The city didn’t charge the Clutchers for the strip and lent skilled labor when needed, and each year the club gave a college scholarship to a Madera high school auto shop student. Cardwell did find faults. He said the concession stand fell well short of sanitary standards, a standby station wagon was no substitute for an ambulance, and the ban on motorcycles could stand to be reviewed. Madera also used two-way average timing, which at the time was used in drag racing only in California.

A two-day event ran September 8-9, 1956, and in 1959 races were held on the second Sunday. On July 12, 1959 the Clutchers shortened the races to an eighth mile and billed it as possibly the first NHRA-sanctioned race at that distance in the country, with proceeds going to the Fresno Valley Children’s Hospital. Another eighth-mile race followed on August 9, then 3/16-mile races in September and October, before a return to the quarter mile for the Central California Championships on November 8, 1959. A powder puff race was popular in 1964, and on May 17 that year Gas Ronda and Lee Barnes ran a best-of-three match race. The Swedish magazine Start & Strip listed Madera among 325 U.S. drag strips in 1968.