Pacemaker Drag Strip/Pacemakers Dragway (Mount Vernon)

Pacemaker Drag Strip was on Columbus Road, southwest of Mount Vernon. In his Drag News column of July 26, 1958, Bill Holz said it was 3,000 feet long and perfectly level, and that the Pacemakers, a club with plenty of drive, worked on it during the week to make it one of Ohio’s better strips. The earliest newspaper mention is a race on July 14, 1957, which may have been the first, though the track’s website says racing began in 1956. On September 29, 1957, Harold Smith drove the dragster of Massillon’s Blue Angels club to its third straight top eliminator win there, at 120.54 mph. On July 27, 1958, two Marion brothers won class trophies: Dan Sampley took B Stock motorcycle at 87 mph and 15.42, and 15-year-old Tom took motor scooter at 25.85 and 62 mph. Motorcyclists liked the strip from the start, and bracket racers did from the 1970s.

On July 11, 1965, Orlie Miller won B/MSP with a 12.75 in the Quarter Milers club car from New Philadelphia. The track was unsanctioned in the early 1970s and joined the NHRA in 1975, running an eighth-mile. It stayed an NHRA eighth-mile until the end of 2019, when it closed for financial reasons. In 2021 Gary Moore and his family reopened it for heads-up, no-prep racing as Pacemakers Outlaw Dragstrip.