Pampa Army Airfield

The first drag races of 1952 ran on a runway of the old Pampa Army Air Field, which newspapers put eight miles east of Pampa. One story called them the first hot rod races of the season, which raises the question of whether there were earlier races, and that hasn’t been answered. The Pampa Hotrod Club and the Pampa Police Department sponsored them, and admission was 25 cents. In 1953 the police gave the Pampa Strip Stretcher’s Car Club permission to hold weekly races on a stretch of the Wheeler Highway twelve miles east of Pampa, which some reports called the old air field. Whether those races were on the highway or the airfield is unclear. The first was April 12, 1953. To draw a crowd at 50 cents a head the club staged odd match races, starting with a hot rod against a single-engine airplane, and paid half the gate to class winners. At the season’s last race on October 11 an eighth-mile match pitted a quarter horse against a 1932 Ford roadster. The Texas Panhandle Timing Association ran the races in 1954.