Sumerduck Dragway (Culpeper)

History

Roger Curtis bought Sumerduck Dragway in 1963 even though its two previous owners had both gone bankrupt with it. He said he had a feeling he could do something with the place, which was nothing but a big field and a little old track that needed a lot of work. There were no guardrails, lights or timing system, only a long slab of pavement in the middle of a forest. Curtis ran it without insurance for the first decade because he couldn’t afford any. The strip appeared in a 1968 list of 325 U.S. drag strips in the Swedish magazine Start & Strip. Its opening year hasn’t been found. Racer Mitchell Morton was killed at the strip in 1991. On November 10, 1996, in a crash reported across the country, Daniel Ray George lost control and went into the grandstands at the NHRA-sanctioned eighth-mile strip, killing Vickie Lynn Foster, a 36-year-old mother, and injuring seven others, including her 5-year-old son. In 2003 Curtis handed the operation to his daughter Joy and her husband, Mike Anderson.