Wattsburg Dragway/P.I.T.A. Drag Strip/Lucky Drag City

History

The Presque Isle Timing Association ran drag races on this strip just north of Wattsburg. Don Jensen and Buck Ackerman built it for $33,000, and it was finished before September 1956, though one researcher is certain it opened in 1958. Photographer George Stroupe filmed racing there in the early years, and the film was shown on Pittsburgh-area TV stations and to local service clubs in fall 1959. For its fourth anniversary on July 3, 1960, the strip held a big meet featuring the fuel dragsters of Lou Cangelose and Bob Stuckey and George Montgomery’s A/GS coupe.

A nephew of Jensen said the track ran slightly uphill, then downhill, then steeply uphill just past the finish to slow the faster cars, and the times still matched up with other tracks. His family ran the concession stand, so he was there every Sunday from the age of three. He saw Ohio George Montgomery, the Arfons brothers, Romeo Palamides, the Little Red Wagon and the start of the funny car era. His uncle got a ride in the Little Red Wagon, which wheelstood the full quarter-mile, turned around and came back on its rear wheels. He also watched Walt Arfons crash an Allison-powered, propeller-driven dragster, E.J. Potter wipe out on a Pontiac-powered motorcycle and the Hill brothers wreck a Willys gasser. He said the strip stayed open into the early ’70s, when his uncle decided it was no longer worth keeping open.

In the summer of 1959 Buck Ackerman paid the Quads of Erie car club a flat fee to work the races, with no member paid individually. One of them remembered the teenagers calling the winning lane at the quarter-mile, since there was only one set of timing traps, inspecting and classing cars in the pits, working the gate and flagging starts, as there were no Christmas tree lights. Dave Snajder (Pimo) did a lot of the flagging. Every time Art Arfons ran the Green Monster, it ended up in the saplings at the top of the hill. Club member Sonny Calkins once put a hole in the oil pan of a helicopter-powered coupe by mistake while inspecting it.

The track still runs as an eighth-mile strip called Lucky Drag City, named for owner Lucky Foley. It was also known as Lowville Drag Raceway.