Utica-Rome Dragway (Vernon)
ClosedClosed No longer racing, but some of the track is still there.
- Drag strip lost 400 feet when the oval was rebuilt as a clay track in 1979
- Raced
- ca. 1965-78
- State
- New York
- What's left
- A good length of the old track surface is still there, in poor to good condition.
- Raced on
- Built as a drag strip
- Location
- Outside the oval at Vernon
- People
- Joe Lesik, builder of the oval (1961-ca. 1964)
- Dick Waterman, owner, built the drag strip (ca. 1964-79)
- Cliff Baker, owner (1979-)
- Elevation
- 642 ft (196 m)
- Coordinates
- 43.07873, -75.51641
Joe Lesik built a paved quarter-mile oval here in 1961 and ran it for three years before selling to Dick Waterman. Waterman ran it for fifteen years, racing the oval on Sunday nights and running a successful Saturday night drag program on a separate strip he built outside the oval. In 1979 he sold to Cliff Baker, a retired school superintendent, who tore out the paved oval for a 5/8-mile clay track. The drag strip was a casualty. Four hundred feet had to be cut off it, and Baker didn’t have the money to rebuild it. His plans for a 100-foot concrete starting pad and Thursday night racing never got past the dreaming stage, and his costly changes soon left him in serious financial trouble. In 1981 newspapers advertised a sealed-bid sale of the property.
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