Smoky Mountain Dragway (Cherokee)

This eighth-mile strip sat between Sylva and Cherokee, near the Tuckasegee River off Highway 441. What’s known comes from old racers and a few newspapers. A report on the October 17, 1965 race called it a new strip. Jimmy Boyd of Greenville won top stock eliminator that day in his Doc Wilson-built Hemi-Hercules Plymouth, but he’d already won there once, and he made it three straight on October 31. That suggests the first race may have been October 3, 1965. Bigger purses soon drew name racers. On November 7 the Super Stock field included Herb McCandless, Gene Hinson and Bob Collins, and the fuel-injected altered wheelbase class had Shirl Greer, Billy Jacobs and Robert Nance. The Swedish magazine Start & Strip listed Smoky Mountain Dragway among 325 U.S. drag strips in 1968, and it was AHRA sanctioned that year. A 1971 ad put it six miles south of Cherokee on Highway 441, just south of Qualla.

One racer won 10-second eliminator there in 1971 in a ‘59 Ford, at 16, when his opponent missed a shift. Another said the track ended in a cornfield beside the river and that Hubert Platt was supposed to show one day but didn’t. A third said the shutdown was so short that faster cars ran only 600 feet in the track’s last years, and he once saw Platt spin his ‘68 1/2 Mustang CJ at the end of the pavement, not knowing the fence was gone and he could have rolled into the pasture. Chris Karamesines reportedly called it the scariest track he ever ran, two narrow strips that bent to miss the river. A racer from 1968 recalled a meet that paid five places, where the winner could race all the other winners for the whole pot. A man with a disability was running the track then. He had first place in hand until he lost to a ‘68 Hemi Cuda called the Thumper, then beat it for third, a mistake that cost him $200, a lot of money in 1968. Robert Nance of Ringgold, Georgia, was fourth. Another racer camped there with his ‘70 Fairlane for a two-day show, won his bracket, and took home polish, a quart of oil, a can of STP and about $7, then red-lighted against a slower car in eliminations.