Vacaville Drag Strip

This strip was built near the Vacaville airport, three miles east of town, with cars running north to south. The builders didn’t allow for the ground settling, so the top end was very rough. Only slower classes ran at the first race, so the rough shutdown area didn’t matter. At the second race, though, the racer who set top speed said the strip was too rough for anything over 115 mph. The top end was repaved after that race and came out worse. Other racers believed that rough section was the main cause of Louis Casaurang’s death on September 30, 1956. He had the meet’s top speed of 134 mph in his roadster when he swerved past the finish line to miss the timing tower. His correction sent the car into a long skid, and it flew fifty feet and landed upside down, crushing him, in front of 3,000 spectators including his wife. Newspapers said the rough pavement may have kept him from recovering. A race was still held a few weeks later, on October 14, 1956, and the whole strip was repaved before the 1957 season.

Leo Saunders of Oakland ran 123.90 mph on August 11, 1957. Two weeks later, on August 25, Ed Cortopassi set a track record of 142 mph in the Glass Slipper streamlined fiberglass dragster, and a week after that Hank Vincent raised it to 145.10 mph. At a two-day championship on October 26-27, 1957, Emory Cook in the Isky-U-Fab Special and Pete Ogden both pushed the mark to 159 mph, and Gene’s Brake Shop Special set a world record for flathead engines on pump gas at 137.08 mph. On May 11, 1958, Chet Davis set a B/GD world record of 152.33 mph in his Cadillac-powered dragster, and Pete Ogden set a track record of 162 mph in his Romeo dragster.