Edinburg Motorsports Park

History

Members of the South Texas Hotrod Association were racing on this old airstrip nine miles north of Edinburg on U.S. Highway 281 by early 1953, maybe late 1952. The Tex-Mex Timing Association leased it from the city of Edinburg and ran the races, at first for competitors only. With insurance in place, the race on Sunday, February 22, 1953, was opened to the public for a small fee. Drag News columnist Chuck Oliver later praised it as a mile-long strip with very good traction and a perfectly flat quarter mile that ended in an uphill stopping area, easy on brakes. Maurice Sykes set a track record of 13.06 seconds on his BSA Golden Flash on April 5, 1953. Races ran every two weeks that year, with the top trophy alternating between fastest car and fastest motorcycle, and stopped for the summer heat.

Racing didn’t start again until February 1956, when the Hidalgo County Highway Patrol, the Sheriff’s Department and some businessmen got permission to use the strip. They sponsored the Rebel Lords Safety Club, a drag racing club for young people, sanctioned and insured by NHRA, which held its first race on August 5, 1956. At the August 11, 1957, race admission was free, but donations were asked to keep racing going. The Rio Grande Valley Jaycees sponsored a two-day race on March 1-2, 1958, run by the Rio Grande Valley Timing Association, with all proceeds to the March of Dimes. At this first two-day Texas-Mexico Championship Drag Race, D. C. McNabb, a 17-year-old Harlingen high school student, set a Texas record for gas-burning cars at 142.85 MPH, and Gene Brown of Corpus Christi took top eliminator and broke the state A/FD record at 150.37 MPH. The meet had 159 entries and 3,000 spectators on the final day.

The track was resurfaced in April 1958. Merle and Kathy Shepherd renamed it Edinburg Speedway in 1975, and it kept that name through at least 1982. The airport is now South Texas International Airport, and the strip runs on an abandoned taxiway. Julio Cantu ran it from 1994 to about 2011. The city then leased it to Freddy Cruz, president of San Antonio Raceway, who changed the name from Edinburg International Racetrack to Edinburg Raceway and joined the IHRA.