Powell Drag Strip (Perry Township)

Robert Powell built a half-mile drag strip on his farm five miles north of Hanover, on Route 668 about 12 or 13 miles northeast of Newark, just before the road turns toward Perryton. He turned it over to the Newark Timing Association, 80 car owners, to race every Sunday. The first race was on August 12, 1956. The September 2 race drew 129 vehicles and 1,850 spectators, with trophies and cash for thirteen class winners. On September 9 Gail Bump of Marysville set a track record of 89.1 mph, and the track paid $35 to anyone who broke the record. After a falling out, the association announced on October 10, 1956, that it had nothing more to do with Powell’s strip, and it moved to Hyde Park in 1957. Powell kept racing and advertised that Art Arfons’s Green Monster jet car might appear on October 21.

Ads for the May 5, 1957 opener said the track had been resurfaced, and the first night race under lights ran July 20, 1957. In December 1957 the Newark Advocate carried an ad for a half-mile asphalt strip, billed as a real money maker, on a 128-acre farm with 3,000 pine trees, which may have been this one. On May 10, 1958, the first Saturday night race of the year, run by the new Accelerators Club of Newark, Gordon Collett, later nicknamed Collecting, set a track record of 120 mph. The track had new asphalt and a new return road that year. In his Drag News column of July 26, 1958, Bill Holz put it at about 2,600 feet, racing Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday nights, with decent spectator lighting, poor lighting for fast cars without lights, and a return road for stockers while modified cars came back on the strip. In October 1958 a 121-acre farm 12 miles from Newark, with a $12,000 blacktop drag strip, was advertised at $18,500 because the owner was taking over a 900-acre farm. In January 1959 the Accelerators talked about leasing the strip, but nothing came of it. No trace of it is visible today.