Ramona Drag Strip/San Diego Raceway

Paul and Bob Darrough leased land on the south side of Ramona Airport, thirty miles northeast of San Diego, to build a drag strip, with Lou Castenagna and Ray Richards joining as managing partners. The track was remote and had to pay tow money to bring in name racers, which it needed to draw crowds. The location and the cost of those racers finished it after only a few years. By 1967 at the latest it ran every Saturday night under NHRA sanction, and the Swedish magazine Start & Strip listed it among 325 U.S. drag strips in 1968. John Wenderski was killed here on February 23, 1964, when a gust of wind hit his AA/FD, the Black Beauty, near the finish lights at 160 to 170 mph. The car drifted left off the track, hit an embankment, flew twenty feet through the air and flipped before landing on rocky ground and breaking apart. At one meet Art Arfons’s Green Monster jet dragster blew the fence behind the staging area down onto some cars.