Most Historic Drag Strip in America? Hot Rod Golden Era Time Capsule Lives Here!! (Super Sketchy)

this has to be one of the single coolest motorsports venues in america there's so much character in every single little piece of this place that you can't even describe there's gonna be a farmer's market you're the closest thing to these walls talking people start throwing bottles at the sheriffs now that's an old plug right there that ladder i used to climb the ladder huh you might know where i'm standing but it might look a little different because we're here in the middle of the day the people's track history of the people's track with none other than the man ronnie barnes who now works here but has been coming here since the 80s he knows all kinds of stuff about this place more than anybody else probably could tell you we're in for some good stories and some awesome old school pictures that he has from his own like personal library it's going to be fun are those divots just from years of burnouts in the same spot that's right that's right that's crazy i mean this whole place is when was this track founded like when did it start 1955 1955. i've heard can't confirm it this was a dirt road at one time and they raced on a dirt road and then of course it got paved when was the first time you came here 1981 1981 started drag racing motorcycles 1977 and then showed up here one night in 1981 81 they had a cable from right here to right here and they had two street lights mounted right here red yellow green activated in the tree in the tower the tower was lower and closer this way that's moved but you activated it there i was announced around here for three or four or five years there was no beam in 1981 just a groove across the starter line there and the the starter would line the cars up uh put one guy in that groove one guy in that groove he'd point like that to the lights and the street lights would come on red yellow green they would take off and we did have we did have a finish line we we did have times but the time started when you hit the button it didn't start when the car moved so it wasn't like a real time it was the when the button you got there is that the cable that the lights used to be on no i don't i don't know because the street lights probably hung to about right here did hunt lower i don't know where those went i don't know if somebody kept them or threw them away or what they did when did this conquer get put here that would have been in the 90s the 60 foot is concrete and then the rest is asphalt but in 81 it was all asphalt uh one of these i think this is i don't remember if this one was here or this one was here they both weren't here both these little concrete pieces were not here the original i think was about that tall and there was just a groove right here and that would have been the starting line so the starter would pull your car pull your tires up here pull his up he'd stand in the middle he'd pull him up and he'd point up and again the tower would hit the button the lights come on they take off so this the beam system they got put in in the 90s yes there was okay so the first time you came here it was just arm drop or stop light stuff stop lights yes headlight comes on you go you wait for green you lose what about that thing like the center divider was put up uh probably in the 90s of course this one it was all asphalt there but there was a groove i remember you had some old pictures where you could see this the yellow painted part of the fence was still like that was there in the 70s or something wasn't it like this original guard rail here they did have the chain link that would be original the chain link oh this was gone but this one's here the chain link with these big big poles those were there those were the photos those are still there uh that fence was not there people parked on the highway uh wouldn't come in if people be lined up on the highway on the guardrail watching the drag races and they decided well how are we going to stop them so they built that so people couldn't see i think i like that wall there because when you're in here at night it feels like you're in such an isolated spot like before i ever came here during the day i didn't know there was a building over there oh cause it's just dark all you see is black and when you're down here it's like the rest of the world doesn't exist it's real tight seems like smaller real tight when all the people are around the bleachers are full yeah and then you got the the pavilions down both sides it's like you know running down a hallway and it's lit here it's not lit out there so this is all you can really see so but all the guard rails are all original i don't remember the guard rail i just remember concrete they added the guardrail what year i don't know but you can see where it says keep off track see the red right there yeah obviously the asphalt has been built up it would have been lower than that and the sides used to be a more of an angle steeper angle had more crown yeah so if you run off the track it was like suction it would just pull you to the wall yeah i never noticed that before but you can down the track because you can see them but we'll check them out down there too they're still down there but you can see the bottom of the k should be like two inches under the asphalt maybe more when was this painted here uh in 81-82 i remember seeing it real bright and it was red yes so this is like some probably 70s wall paint here that's crazy i think that the asphalt's been built up this much i mean i guess this might be like the you know old stuff under here the later this was always paved it wasn't dirt so many people would come out here they would park their trailer cars right here on the side of the track they would unload their cars and then back up and race and then they'd had to go get in line but their cars were parked right here halfway down the track when did they put the pavilions in i don't know but i do know i've got a photo see where the pavilion the low pavilion stops and the second one goes up yeah i've got a picture where the second pavilion was not there and that was in 68. so that when after the first pavilion it was dirt there's a tree like this big around where that second pavilion is now is it still under there no no it's all dirt now but they filled that in with cement and then they didn't fill the second part when did they add the jersey barriers off the main wall that would have been maybe 10 years ago people hitting the wall and messing up the pavilions when they were you know well it didn't really i think it's more of a protection thing from the people uh because people are standing right here in a car hits you know right here it's they could get they could get injured yeah these aren't i guess when it's it's built up there's not much to keep a car like if a truck hit the wall and there was none of this it would go through the fence this set is lower i believe in that side so there's a little more protection over there but you can see this guard rail the metal guard rail i don't remember those and so i don't know when they put that here was the track surface always asphalt always yes it was yes always all asphalt all the way down in 81 my first night out here was a saturday night racing motorcycles and my first run went through there went around the turn and came back and actually about to the turn potholes were this big around and that deep all the way around so when you finish racing we would turn around with the motorcycles and drive up the track backwards while cars were still racing we'd be on the shoulder but we'd turn around come back off the track wow it was it was nasty you didn't you wouldn't want to drive a car around it much less motorcycle so i guess cars weren't as fast back then do you remember what kind of times people were running even with the stoplight configuration well in the 80s uh with that light system one car uh hillbilly in the vega win a 490. really yeah wow he's going on red you know it's which would have been it would have been a low five i'm sure it'd been a low five i mean that's impressive for a car in the 80s that's a that'd be a fast car here today sure that's crazy you can see the that this is like rough asphalt but there's so much rubber packed in here that is like smooth now uh but if you notice over here no guard rail so that that was probably put in at a later date but see there's no work right there yeah that's just wall and that's the way it used to be hitting this wall all the way it's crazy that you could see the the progression of layers like if you blur out the taller grid fence you just look at the chain link in the poles that would have been like the original one and they added the the thicker mesh that went higher and then down there they added higher chain link on top of it but they just kept everything there so it was just like everything was just added and look at this how they put the chain link fence up they just weld some rebar down over it to hold it there that's like some permanent yeah so this really is the original chain link from the original rebar wow what's with the barbed wire i was wondering it looks like prison in here it does the barbed wire uh we had a car i was in the tower that day we had a car he's racing to dragster it was hippie in the corporation vega racing the gtx kestrel dragster and hippie did his burn out backed up well draxler was taking a real long time hippie got out talking to him talking trash his tires cooled so when he got ready to race he took off well the vega just went sideways spawned and flipped over and stopped somewhere about about right about here it stopped and it caught on fire and there was no fire extinguishers out here and it burned for quite a while eventually the gas tank exploded and about 20 minutes later the nitrous bottle exploded and when it when it exploded it blew fire over it was a junkyard and it blew fire it caught the field of fire over there well he exploded so big we found one piece of the bottle that's it don't know where i'm at anyway we're still he's still messing we're trying to get the fire out people are bringing fire sticking sure he'd use it he had a broken arm and finally two sheriffs came in and they pulled up right here and they're trying to get him away from the car it's still just burning in big flames they're trying to get him away from the car he doesn't want to get away from the car so he's pulling away from him and they put him in handcuffs people start throwing bottles at the sheriffs and the two sheriffs they're behind their squad cars with guns out tried to miss the bottles and then the next week that's where the chicken wire came from okay so all that happened on the track yes there were there's a burning exploding car on the track and police with their guns drawn getting bottles thrown at them while this car is like on fire blowing stuff out of the field way over there what the heck this place that's insane man if these you're the closest thing to these walls talking you know that okay like man there was no chicken wire this was here the rail yeah it was here so people could just fling bottles right and the cops were just trying to get him away from the car what year was that about late 80s wow so there's chicken wire but what about the actual barbed wire that like it goes over there and that came at a later date i believe that's just to keep people from hopping the fence is what that's for like uh like some of the nonsense that happened last week yeah because you know the the on that side the barbed wire goes towards the crowd so they're obviously not trying to keep people from going into the crowd they're trying to keep the crowd from coming out i kind of noticed that how this part is all sectioned off so if someone from the crowd wants to get up in the face of somebody here they either gotta go over the fence or walk all the way around there because even the pits are gated and you got security into the like into the staging lanes so it's very separate and i remember when uh the guardrail was in the pit and there was no chain link fence uh this chain-link fence here we'd drive our motorcycles right up here and just go right in if you didn't have to go around and i think i came here it was three dollars to get in it was 50 cents to race we're heading down to the end of the track with some more visible history but what was going on with the pavilions and stuff here uh the lights that are on the side right here there were no lights so most of the racing was done in the daytime it wasn't all they did a little bit at night but people got out here early and raced during the day not at night because the track was not lit the guard lights you see there on the telephone poles yeah that's the only lights that were on the track that was it this was dark totally dark when did the lights get put in maybe mid 90s well it's out here is this where the tree is that you were talking about it used to be a big tree here yeah you can see where the pavilion stops and they didn't concrete this and you can see where the pavilion this was the only pavilion out here these were not here this was the only pavilion here and then the picture i'm going to send you there's a huge tree right here people standing on this side people standing on that side and i believe i believe they raised quarter mile i think a quarter mile would be close to the end of this pavilion see where the end of the concrete is that's probably pretty close to a quarter mile yeah bigger half and half it may have been a little short but i think they raced farther down of course cars weren't that fast back then so yeah you know that would make sense there now if you see candy man leave it punched right there good luck stopping yeah yeah no i can't believe some of these guys you know at the hood track race they're pulling shoots and that files down we'll check that out later but that that shutdown is pretty intense for some of these really fast guys that come through here and i saw some pictures they're not mine this the fence was not here but that uh rail right there was there so this was open you can see how low it is to the track it's a good thing we put the barriers here yeah very because you could definitely get through that that used to be a junkyard over there it was it was full of cars grown up grass and like i said when a hippie's car blew up the nitrous blew up it took 30 minutes before it blew up and it blew a couple of people lost windows in their cars and it blew fire over there and started burning that fire department had to put all that out wow what's all this uh old rebar sticking up through here looks like they don't know are they gonna do something else with it or never did it looks like they would possibly have gonna put uh a moral foundation like the to match that to finish that and they just never did yeah it looks unfinished project yeah because you could see that if this were filled in it would kind of keep the same level they just gave up on it were you looking for that how'd it get down here that's funny yeah you don't really appreciate how much covered space this is like if these things had walls they would be giant buildings yeah these finish line lights that are here the originals uh that's cable i guess the originals had a cable but they hung down the originals hung down when i came out here in 81 they were about this high and they i think there was i think there was two i think there was one here uh and then there was one right about where those lights are let's go down there actually the people want to hear the crazy stories okay it's part of like the the character and the mystique and all of that oh yeah these walls are way older yeah yeah you can see the same red writing on down there as that was over there there used to be like a little judges stand right here with a uh r panel roof on it got about three people i used to stand in there and take pictures yeah you can see where it got chopped out of the ground is that is that the old footing for it there was when did that get cut out uh probably in the late 80s early 90s there's way less evidence of human involvement down this far all the all like the wear and tear people watching are down here but you come down to the big end and it's it's pretty much a time capsule down here when they had the old lights here uh that hung way down the foundation for the lights was somewhere right in here and they had a a column about this big around that tall it was concrete and it was right there dang and we were out here one night what was the name of that car godzilla beautiful 67 camaro fast he started getting sketchy coming down through there he lost control and he hit the he hit the concrete that was right here it was this big around that tall he hit that and the back of the car clipped clipped the light right there it clipped the cable the cable was just swinging wow and when he hit that it knocked it completely out of the ground it knocked it in two pieces it was that big around solid company wow so we run down here he's unconscious he's trapped in the car the car's catching on fire we can't get the guy out luckily the fire goes out we get the guy out he had some messed up legs but he was unconscious when we got down here and that was a that could have been a bad one is that you can see a little bit of round indent in the asphalt there is that where it was that could have been where it was yep this is right where it was at because when you hit that the back of the car went up like this and then it came down on its four wheels but the back of the car the spoiler hit that was it concrete down here well yeah you can see uh possibly the track was concrete then but you can see right here it stops and it turns to asphalt it may have been asphalt the whole time but look right here you can see concrete where it goes from here to there you can see concrete there it was concrete from wall to wall yeah like it alternates i don't know if the track i don't know if they had concrete here and asphalt here i don't know that was in 68 that's only 10 years old it looks like the it stops well there's like a little bit of a groove here that looks like it might stop but over here it looks like it might just be like side pieces it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why would they just make a little strip here they may have cut it they may have cut it out that's asphalt out here guess that drains not draining much anymore they used to work down both sides uh the drains come out down here at the end of the track this is so crazy of course back then we didn't have mile per hour we had to finish it was good enough for them still had fun this place right here was a hot spot during the golden age of hot rod all of it 68 go to the dealership buy a brand new 68 camaro and take it here even now now it's back and you got 16 year olds ripping zl1 camaros through here technology times have changed but the buildings and the walls haven't the drag strip's still a drag strip that's so cool i'm going to check out some of this paint down there on those walls that looks like it literally looks like nothing has been touched at all here yeah the wheelie pictures i've got i've got you've seen you know i'll probably look at that wheelie picture uh it was a little further up there but the other picture i have uh that was just bright red but here's some uh there look at this concrete that's untouched at that drain you know that something's gonna have to be done pretty soon about that but uh i mean you could see that it was concrete to there yeah it definitely was and that's always been there since 81 that's never been replaced my people watching the videos always have such a hard time figuring out who won i say it a million times the right lane has a red light that comes on and the left lanes green it's those are those right there that's what you should be looking for at the 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