Westhampton Raceway/Long Island Dragway

Accounts of how this strip started don’t agree. Later histories say it opened as a dirt strip around 1953, that the quarter mile was paved with asphalt in 1955 with a dirt shutdown, and that the shutdown was paved in the mid- to late 1950s. A 1957 newspaper story, which seems more reliable, says that after the Glen Cove and Northport sites closed, Long Island police and hot rodders went looking for a new place and found one in Westhampton. Four Caricola brothers from Huntington, Nick, Jack, Pete and Jim, laid out and graded a 4,900-foot strip for quarter-mile racing. It was paved, with a dirt shutdown, for the opening race on September 9, 1956. A regional race drew entries from eight states on October 13-14, 1956, sanctioned by the Automobile Timing Association of America and run by the Long Island Hot Rod Association. Ed Eaton of Huntington headed the group that ran the strip that year, sometimes called Eastport Drag Strip. Newspapers said it was a five-minute drive from Route 27 at Old County Road in Eastport and that a half-mile runway was used for racing and shutdown.

In 1958 the strip ran into Southampton’s blue laws for racing on Sunday and charging admission. Officers Bernard Corrigan, Edward J. Eaton, John Caricola and John A. Sutherland were arrested, but a grand jury refused to indict them. It kept the Westhampton Raceway name until about 1969, then was briefly Suffolk County Raceway, listed in Hot Rod in March 1969 as NHRA sanctioned with Gary Richard as manager. In the 1980s it was Hampton Raceway, from 1991 to 1996 Long Island Dragway, and finally Long Island Motorsports Park. It stood a short way east of Old Country Road and 5th Avenue in Westhampton, and every trace of it has been scraped away.