Manville Airport

An online source says quarter-mile drag races were held on a runway at Manville Airport, also called Kupper’s Field and now Central Jersey Regional Airport. The field opened in the late 1930s or early 1940s. It’s described as unused by planes since the mid-1940s, yet also as serving as both an airport and a drag strip in the 1950s.

In 1956 “Berserko” Bob Doerrer, then 10, tagged along when his Uncle Carl debuted their 1951 Ford Tudor flathead gasser at what he called an outlaw track in Manville. They flat-towed it behind a delivery truck from his father’s flower shop. The first time trial went fine. On the second, something broke and the engine backfired, the leaky Stromberg carburetors fed a huge fire, and the car burned to the ground while Carl got clear and the track crew tried in vain to put it out. They sold what was left to a junk dealer at the track. The fire burned a hole in the lane about 50 feet off the line that had to be patched before racing resumed, which didn’t make them popular, and it was a grim ride home.

By 1961 newspapers were calling it Manville Dragway and placing the races at the new Manville Airport. Weekly races ran through October that year under NASCAR and Timing Association of North America sanction, with Ed Otto promoting and Rick Decker operating. The 50-foot runway strip got three-foot guardrails on both sides and a six-foot metal fence between the rail and the seats. Sunday racing angered residents of neighboring Little Weston, and on September 12, 1961, Hillsborough officials ordered it stopped for a zoning violation. Decker applied for a special use permit and kept racing until the hearing, where a big crowd spoke on both sides and the zoning board put off a decision. On October 9 the board voted unanimously to end Sunday racing. Decker sued four days later and held what turned out to be the last race on October 15, 1961. After that he ran the field only as an airport, and for a couple of years he tried without success to get Hillsborough to allow drag racing again.