Vineland Speedway Drag Strip

The speedway opened on South Delsea Drive in 1955 as a half-mile dirt track. It was paved in 1958 and grew to include a 1.5-mile sports car road course with a quarter-mile drag strip. After being swamped with requests, owner and promoter Bill Nocco opened the track to drag racers on a four-week trial starting May 10, 1958. The AHRA sponsored the races and the Power-Paks car club of Gloucester City ran them, with more than 20 classes and fifty cars at the first meet. Frank Simirigla of Blenheim took top honors with a 76.2 MPH average, and Fred Hartley of Vineland was fastest at 78.8 MPH. Nocco had promised a regulation strip if interest held. The Delaware Valley Timing Association helped at the May 17 race, and 1,000 people came on May 31, which convinced Nocco and promoter Tony Coccaro to go ahead. Racers had to chain the driver’s door shut with a padded metal chain the track supplied. In July the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Division approved the strip, which was to be finished in three weeks.

In an August 23, 1958 Drag News column, Bill Holz described the strip as a converted race track with the grandstand straightaway stretched to about 2,750 feet, 50 feet wide, with a three-foot concrete wall on the left and a crash fence on the right that gave drivers a hemmed-in feeling. The grandstands were within 15 feet of the strip, there was a quarter mile of paved run-up, and Holz said it ran under the NHRA banner. On August 17, 1958, Walt Kinsley of Sewell won top eliminator for the third week running at 126 MPH, and Joe Sutherland of Long Island set a strip record of 138.25 MPH in his Cadillac-powered dragster. NHRA held a regional championship on the newly paved strip on September 20-21, and 150 to 200-plus racers came every Sunday for the rest of 1958.

In 1959 racing ran every Saturday night from June through September. In 1960 the races were NHRA sanctioned, and Joe Jacono was among nearly 500 entries at an NHRA event on Sunday, May 8. Races were mostly on Saturdays in 1963, and on June 15 the strip booked a match race between Malcolm Durham’s ‘63 Chevy “Strip Blazer” and Don Coppola’s ‘63 Plymouth. The speedway lost money, mainly because Nocco had to pay leases to several landowners, and bad weather and poor crowds hurt too. The last blow came in February 1965, when 75 acres off Sherman Avenue, part of it leased to the speedway, was chosen for a community college. The speedway agreed to close by the time the school was built and shut down in July 1965.