Yellow River Drag Strip (Newton County)

This strip opened around 1959 between Covington and Conyers. A race called the International Drag Races ran on Friday, October 23, 1959, and on March 8, 1964, Don Nicholson ran 11.16 in his ‘64 fiberglass Mercury Comet Marauder station wagon at a Covington track. Everything else about the place is overshadowed by what happened on March 2, 1969, the worst racing disaster in the country.

S. R. Campbell owned the strip then. It had no guardrails, and spectators packed both sides along the full length of the narrow track. Huston Platt was racing his “Dixie Twister” funny car against Frank Oglesby. The cause is still uncertain, but Platt’s car veered off before the finish, jumped a sand embankment, went through a wire fence and plowed into the crowd. Eleven people were killed and fifty were hurt. The owner had little or no insurance, and the strip closed for good.

A spectator who was there said the word at the time was that the Camaro funny car broke an axle. He recalled almost no crowd control, with people standing 3 to 5 feet from the asphalt, and said Platt pulled the chute, maybe out of habit to straighten the car. Several people were caught in the chute and others along the edge were run over. Twenty years later Platt spoke publicly about it for the first time. He said the car got loose the way they do, so he pulled the double parachutes, that people were standing about a yard from the track, and that when the chute caught a boy the car shot off to the side. Another racer remembered better days before the crash, when Yellow River had some of the hottest SS and FX racing around. Only the asphalt strip is left, now a road in a mobile home community.