Walker Air Force Base (Roswell)
ClosedClosed No longer racing, but some of the track is still there.
- The club painted a white X at each end of the strip so pilots wouldn't land on it
- Raced
- 1957-66
- State
- New Mexico
- What's left
- A good length of the old track surface is still there, in poor to good condition.
- On the site today
- Roswell International Air Center
- Raced on
- A military airfield
- First race
- August 11, 1957
- Last race
- September 11, 1966 (last documented)
- Track
- 1/4 mile
- Surface
- Macadam runway
- Location
- Runway east of Walker Air Force Base, three miles south of Roswell
- People
- The Dusters car club, race operator (1957-66)
- Sanction
- NHRA
- Elevation
- 3,657 ft (1,115 m)
- Coordinates
- 33.30569, -104.53404
Walker Air Force Base, three miles south of Roswell, was built in 1941 as an Army Air Corps flying school and closed in 1967. The runways and many of the buildings are still there, and the site is now the Roswell International Air Center. The Dusters, a car club at the base, held the first race on their new quarter-mile strip, on a 7,000-foot macadam runway east of the base, on August 11, 1957. There were paved return lanes, and 71 cars raced for 23 trophies. Admission and car entry were 50 cents each for the monthly races. The half-finished strip confused pilots who didn’t know the area, so the club painted a big white X at each end to keep planes from landing on it. The annual New Mexico-West Texas championships were scheduled there for November 10, 1957, gasoline only.
NHRA-sanctioned races ran on the second Sunday of each month in 1959 and 1960, and on the third Sunday from March through October in 1961. Nothing has turned up between 1962 and the New Mexico State Championship drag races on September 11, 1966, but the Dusters were still active, so races were probably held. The strip was on a 1968 list of 325 U.S. drag strips in the Swedish magazine Start & Strip.
Background
During World War II and just after, the base was Roswell Army Air Field, and in the early Cold War it grew into the largest Strategic Air Command base. It was renamed in 1948 for Gen. Kenneth Newton Walker, a New Mexico native who received the Medal of Honor after being lost on a 1943 bombing mission. It's also the base tied to the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.
