Unnamed drag strip (Mansfield)

The Gents, a 75-member Mansfield car club, got two years’ permission from Mansfield Municipal Airport to race on a 2,200-foot stretch of old State Route 13 beside the landing strip. They hoped to be ready by July 1954, and two NHRA officials inspected the strip in August. Plans called for automatic timing, pits, a grandstand and repaving in 1955. The first race, NHRA sanctioned, finally ran on September 12, 1954, at a fifth-mile, with more than 1,500 people watching 80 entries, mostly from Ohio plus two from Pennsylvania and one from Indiana. Entry was $2 per car and admission 50 cents, with trophies in sixteen classes. One entry was a supercharged Model A Ford with eight carburetors. The Akron Cam Jammers helped run it, and with no timing equipment, winners came from elimination heats. The October 24 race drew 1,200 spectators and 92 competitors, and Otis Smith, president of the Akron club, had the top speed at 89.65 mph.

In early 1955 the Gents planned to add four feet of asphalt to each side of the 22-foot strip and build bleachers for a May opening. The only race in 1958 was a two-day state championship on September 13-14, run on the airport’s east-west runway. Five thousand spectators watched several hundred racers on the final day. Jiggs Shamblin and Dale Hartong of Akron won the five-foot top eliminator trophy, and Willie Snyder of Ashtabula got a three-foot trophy for top speed, 152.54 mph. That seems to have been the Gents’ last race in Mansfield. Their hope of building their own strip never came true, and the club kept doing car washes, poker runs and car shows for a few years.