Piedmont Drag Strip/Dragway (Julian)
ActiveActive Still racing today.
Also known as Piedmont Dragway
Greg Loflin and Terry Ferrell bought Piedmont Dragway in October 2026. Renovations are planned ahead of an April or May 2027 reopening.
- Ronnie Sox won Super Stock at the 1963 season opener
- A 1987 race was televised nationally on the Nash Motoworld network
- David Sox ran a winning 5.85 at 121 mph in a Sox & Martin car in 1973
- Raced
- 1957-present
- State
- North Carolina
- First race
- 1957 per the track; 1958 earliest found in newspapers
- Track
- 1/8 mile
- Address
- 6750 Holt Store Rd.
Greensboro, NC 27283 - People
- Ralph Stubblefield, co-owner (early 1960s)
- Bob Starr, owner (ca. 1963-65)
- Burlington investor group, owners (1971)
- Tommy Thomasson, manager (1971)
- Jim Turner, owner and operator (1990s)
- Sanction
- IHRA
- Elevation
- 707 ft (216 m)
- Coordinates
- 35.99399, -79.59035
Big races
Big Dog Shootout
A heads-up series for fast street and race cars that has run at Piedmont since the early 1990s.
Carolina No-Time events
No-time heads-up racing weekends, including the Blood Wars event in late June.
Bracket points series
Track bracket points program, sanctioned in recent years by IHRA and then WDRA.
History
The track’s own website dates it to 1957, but newspaper research hasn’t turned up anything earlier than about 1958. That year it ran weekly Sunday races. It was called Piedmont Drag Strip until about 1991, and from about 1972 it was also known as Piedmont Dragway. Ralph Stubblefield was a co-owner in the early 1960s, and Bob Starr owned it from about 1963 to 1965. At the 1963 opener on January 27, Ronnie Sox won Super Stock in his ‘63 Chevy. In 1966 the strip hosted a Ku Klux Klan rally. On April 22, 1968, Paul Buckner, 54, was hit by a car and killed while clearing an object from the path of a road sweeper.
A group of Burlington investors bought the strip in 1971, with Tommy Thomasson as manager. They added new bleachers, a concession stand, restrooms and timing equipment, and brought the track under IHRA sanction. On April 22, 1973, Ronnie’s brother David Sox ran a Sox & Martin car to a winning 5.85 at 121.00 mph on the eighth-mile. A 1987 race was shown nationally on the Nash Motoworld network. Jim Turner owned and ran the track in the 1990s. It’s at 6750 Holts Store Road in Julian and was still running as an eighth-mile IHRA track in 2016.
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