Somerset Drag Strip

Somerset had weekly drag racing by 1963 at the latest. On July 30, 1963, Henry ‘Peanuts’ Moore of Stanford, Kentucky, won top eliminator at 13.41 and 103.21 mph. The strip was a few miles west of Somerset on Route 80, on what is now Raceway Drive (or Raceway Trailer Park Road), a street in a mobile home park.

Cars returned by driving back up the track. One old-timer remembered an Anglia coming back too fast one night, skidding out the gate and across Route 80 to stop in front of a building on the other side. Another racer said the shutdown dropped over a hill, and you needed good brakes to stop before the fence. He believed Somerset closed after a car coming back the wrong way hit one making a run, and thought someone may have died. The fatal crash was 22-year-old Ron Day’s: on October 9, 1965, his dragster failed to stop and went off the end of the track.