Virginia Beach Drag Strip/Freedom 7 Dragway/Creeds Field

The Navy built this outlying field in 1945 to support training at NAS Norfolk, with three 2,500-foot concrete runways. It was decommissioned after the war and mostly abandoned. As Virginia Beach Drag Strip it was listed among NHRA-sanctioned tracks in Hot Rod, racing every Sunday over a fifth of a mile, and it went through several names over the years. One man remembered racing at Creeds in high school in the early 1960s.

Another visitor came across it in the 1960s while on vacation, after he and his friends kept seeing drag cars on trailers and followed them out into what seemed like the wilderness. They got there around 11 PM and left at 2 AM with the cars still running. He remembered a field of at least a dozen big-name A/FX and super stock cars, including the Lafayette Ford Mustang with wild wheelstands, Big Red Dodge, Color-Me-Gone and Bounty Hunter. The strip had no lights, and cars ran down the same asphalt as the return lane, separated by a few plastic cones. He wasn’t sure anyone got eliminated, since the same cars came back after each break, and he called it the wildest show he’d ever seen, while allowing his memory might be a bit exaggerated.

Racing went on into the 1970s. A Virginia Beach police officer from the mid-to-late 1970s said officers were assigned to the weekend races to check for underage drinking and handle the crowd. In the 1980s it was called Creeds. A racer who was track champion in the final season said it closed for good after 1985, and that the Virginia Beach police later used it for driver training.