Vina Raceway

Drag races were held on an abandoned World War II auxiliary landing field eighteen miles northwest of Chico and three miles east of the hamlet of Vina. The first race was on May 25, 1952, after a month’s delay waiting for insurance papers from Lloyd’s of London, and no other 1952 race has turned up. The old field was a paved rectangular landing mat, which one joker called the fastest parking lot around.

David Anderson, who was often on the surface of what had been Chico Auxiliary #3, said part of it was used as a drag strip from 1963 to 1966. Bob Foor got permission to run a strip there, called Vina Raceway, from either the landowner or the county board of supervisors, and Mike Pelak ran it. The asphalt hadn’t been maintained since it was built, apparently during WWII, but parts of it were good enough to race on. Metal roadside-style guard rails were put in and were probably removed when the track shut down. The strip ran north to south through roughly the middle of the asphalt. Incorporation papers for Vina Raceway were filed March 2, 1966. A six-turn sports car course was laid out on the mat for an SCCA race with a $3,000 purse on June 2, 1968, and on Sunday, October 13, 1968, the Chico Jaycees put on a drag race with cash prizes. One man who later found a 1968 Super Stock magazine feature on Vina, which it said ran from 1963 to 1968, remembered race posters on phone poles all over his Southern Oregon hometown around 1965 or 1966. Friends who made the four- or five-hour drive told him plenty of people from their town turned out, probably because of all the advertising in Southern Oregon and Northern California towns. The private airport is now called Deer Creek Ranch Airport.