Raven Rock Airport Drag Strip/Portsmouth Dragway

Once the county built a new airport at Minford, north of Portsmouth, the old Raven Rock Airport in West Portsmouth was free for drag racing. The first race, on June 16, 1957, was run by the Kustom Kouriers Club of Portsmouth. Only the first 150 feet of the quarter-mile runway strip was blacktopped, and the rest was gravel treated with heavy oil, a poor surface for the 39 entries. Bob Warren of Columbus won top eliminator before a fair-sized crowd in his 1934 B gas coupe. Fast cars tore up the slag base, so before the next Sunday Charles Bracken and Taylor Lawson put $26,000 into paving the rest with asphaltic concrete, 22 feet wide and 2,500 feet long. They also bought better timing gear, since the old timer topped out at 120 mph and several cars had gone faster.

Word of the paving spread, and 109 vehicles came on June 30. Warren won top eliminator for the third week running. Gordon Collett, later a nationally known top gas dragster driver, won often that fall, taking his sixth straight top eliminator on October 20, 1957, with a run of 116.83 mph as he raised the track record nearly every week. The strip was widened and resurfaced in 1962. Over Labor Day weekend 1963 it staged what it called the Poor Man’s Nationals. In 1974 it was renamed Portsmouth Dragway.