Prairie Hill Dragway

The Central Texas Timing Association, made up of four Waco car clubs (the Dragons, Saints, Travelers and Sabers) and sponsored by two Waco Exchange Clubs, held its first race at Prairie Hill on July 15, 1956. The strip was twenty-two miles east of Waco on the south side of U.S. Highway 84. The second race was August 26 and the season ended November 25. The group had first tried for an auxiliary landing field just east of McGregor, closer to Waco, but couldn’t make it work. Its main goal was to curb illegal street racing in Waco. In 1957 it looked for land to build its own strip.

Articles in the 1950s never said the races ran on a mile-long concrete runway at Prairie Hill Air Force Base, but ads for an August 5, 1962, race named that location, and the Waco News Tribune called it Prairie Hill’s new drag strip. Most likely the races were at the same site, and after four years without racing the 1962 strip was described as new. The group that ran Prairie Hill in 1962 also ran Harker Heights. Billy Swiny and Leo Leachman bought the strip in 1963 and renamed it Lone Star Drag Strip. On October 13, 1963, Bobby Langley took top eliminator with an 8.2 ET, and on October 27 four fuel dragsters raced side by side, a first in Texas. By 1967 it was NHRA sanctioned, with Bruce Winter as manager. One fan who went in 1970, drawn by a big ad in the Waco paper, remembered a woman in a purple Hemi Cuda convertible, a big field of junior stockers, brutal heat and a sunburn. Today it runs without sanction as Prairie Hill Dragway, on the easternmost runway.