T-Bird Drag Strip/Balboa Park Raceway Drag Strip/West Pacific Dragway (Eugene)

This eighth-mile strip in Eugene started as an airport. Built sometime between 1945 and 1947 as Willamette Airpark, it became T-Bird Airpark between 1962 and 1964 and had a 2,100-foot paved runway running northwest to southeast. Rod Ormsby spent $28,000 turning it into an eighth-mile strip and hoped to make it a quarter-mile, which never happened. John Tucker, who learned to fly there and did odd jobs for flying time, thought drag racing started in 1967, when he worked the races. He believed the airpark undercharged for its aviation services and quit that business in 1967, and that the owners added racing for revenue but didn’t much like the noise and crowds. It became known as Balboa Park Drag Strip, after its spot near West 11th and Danebo at Balboa Road. The March 1969 Hot Rod listed Balboa Park Raceway as NHRA sanctioned, with Ormsby managing.

It mostly served local sportsman racers. In the mid-1970s, Jim Rockstad, who ran drag racing at Portland International Raceway, and others from Seattle International Raceway rented Balboa for a small Friday funny car show ahead of a 64-car funny car event in Seattle. Rockstad, who had crashed his AA/GS Anglia there in 1971, described a slick, bumpy, worn track with a few thousand seats, almost no parking and tiny pits, soon to be squeezed out by nearby businesses. Around 16 funny cars showed up, including Ed “the Ace” McCulloch, the Hawaiian, Pisano, the Blue Max, Jungle Jim and Danny Ongais, the biggest field Eugene had seen, where local shows usually had eight cars. Four or five thousand fans packed in, with cars parked along both sides of the highway as far as anyone could see. Bill Doner, president of International Raceway Parks, flew in and spent the evening building up the Chicago-style final. Well before 10 p.m., with two rounds done, a police officer in a suit told Rockstad he had exactly ten minutes to finish because of neighbor complaints.

It was briefly called West Pacific Dragway before closing, possibly around 1977. Nothing is left of the airpark or strip, which are overgrown with grass and blackberries.