Back when the John Wayne Airport was known as the Orange County Airport, its runway was used for more than just planes. In 1950, when Santa Ana was orange groves, bean fields and a few houses, Orange County residents would pull up on a Sunday to an unused runway at the nearby airport to watch drag races.
Observers paid 50 cents and the competitors paid $1. A crowd of people waited behind fallen telephone poles used as makeshift dividers between them and the runway. The car line up would be anything from hot rods to “souped up” Model Ts to custom-built drag roadsters.
How did this pastime in Orange County come to be?
The automobile industry was just taking off, and from the late 1940s to early 1950s, some young car owners began modifying their vehicles for “optimal performance,” which became known as “hot rodding.” With faster vehicles came street racing, which became a dangerous pastime in the area.
Orange County residents C.J. “Pappy” Hart, Frank Stillwell and Creighton Hunter took it upon themselves to conceptualize a safer alternative to street racing, and came up with the idea to put together a weekly race in a controlled environment.
They got it approved by the California Highway Patrol commissioner and the Orange County Board of Supervisors and after pooling together $1,000, you could say they were off to the races.
They landed on a quarter-mile concrete strip of unused runway, at what is now John Wayne Airport. They worked out a deal with airport officials: In exchange for using the runway, the airport would get 10 percent of the revenue and a secure insurance policy to cover the drag strip.
The drag strip opened on June 19, 1950, with races held on Sundays from dawn to dusk. The Santa Ana Drags is recognized by the NHRA as the nation’s first commercial drag strip. It brought racing fans from across the country to Orange County to see the drag strip and see how it operated, so that they could start their own.
An estimated 15,000 people lined up to watch thousands of races over the years that were held on the course on Sundays. Additionally, it’s said that drag racing legends such as Art Chrisman, Don Yates and Calvin Rice were regulars at the drag strip.
Despite the support, the Santa Ana Drags came to an end on June 21, 1959. With plans to expand the Orange County Airport, the Board of Supervisors evicted the Santa Ana Drags. Initially, there were plans of relocating the drag races to another site in the area, however the plans never materialized.
Instead, Hart, who had become the sole owner of the Santa Ana Drag, went on to manage the nearby Lions Drag Strip in Los Angeles from 1965 to 1971. Additionally, he served as a consultant to a number of tracks and the NHRA for many years.
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