Mission Raceway [old]

After racing at Abbotsford Airport until 1957, the B.C. Custom Car Association started holding drag races a quarter mile south of Mission City in 1965. Jack Williams took top eliminator in his A/D at the last race of that first season. On May 29, 1966, before 3,500 spectators, Jerry Berschauer of Wenatchee, Washington, beat Williams for top eliminator in his AA/FD and set a track record of 8.22. Ads billed Mission as the first British Columbia strip to see a run over 200 mph, and Jerry Ruth set a track record of 209.30 mph there on September 18, 1966, before 2,700 fans. On October 9, Williams ran 8.62 at 184.42 mph in his Syndicate Scuderia dragster. Mission hosted an NHRA regional points meet in July 1967, where five national records fell, and held an NHRA regional every year until it closed. At the 1968 regional, Ruth ran 6.93, the first sub-seven-second pass on a Canadian strip. Planes sometimes made emergency landings on the strip, and one old-timer remembered a race day in the mid-1970s halted so a pilot could land his Cessna. On September 2, 1973, 23 people were burned by fuel sprayed from John Paxon’s rocket-powered dragster. The last drag race was on October 1, 1978, after the property was sold for industrial development.