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We pulled into the place in the late afternoon, and my ears
wiggled at the first thing I heard from the PA.
“Remember, you can’t drink and drive at Sikeston
Dragstrip. You can drink all you want; we don’t give
out DUIs here. However, you can’t do it and race. ‘Cuz
if you do, we’ll have to send you back to your house.”
Drink and drive at a dragstrip? That MIGHT be a problem?
Anarchy in the UK, what’ll they think of next? Actually
that message was about as wild as it got at Sikeston. Well,
almost as wild, Burk’s exploding windshield in a first-round
loss aboard a 6,500-lb Cadillac Escalade in round one of Trophy
was an attention-riveter.
Truthfully, the track had been cleaned up quite a bit since
its “heyday.” Ray Poirier, the owner, had repoured
the track three years ago, leaving behind a worthy all concrete,
50-foot-wide, eighth-mile and immaculate, totally diagonal
super market-parking pitted facility.
We came, we saw, we took off the next morning for Arkansas,
and the Holy Grail of rough and tumble country dragstrips,
George Ray’s Wildcat Hot Rod Dragstrip.
George Ray’s Wildcat Hot Rod Dragstrip would be perfect
for an old hot rod movie. Just remove all the race cars, (except
for Ray’s home-built roadster) and fit in pre-1961 (the
year the track was built) cars and it IS 1961. The proprietor
himself says nothing’s changed since then, and it hasn’t.
You turn off Interstate 412 to State Road 135 and a few hundred
yards down is a white house with a garage sale-like sign in
the front yard that reads “George Ray’s Dragstrip".
A left turn into the driveway and some 50 yards and there’s
a ticket booth, and to the right, a slough/creek where a pre-teen
kid is fishing!! A look left is a 100-acre plus cat fish farm
and to the right of the slough, is maybe 200 acres worth of
cotton farm.
Fifty more yards straight ahead, and there is this roughly
30-foot wide concrete strip, the track’s staging lanes,
that extends an eighth mile to this weary, sun-bleached wooden,
criss-crossed lumber, and rickety cross-over bridge. The clearance
under the bridge barely accepted the height of Burk’s
voluminous Cadillac Escalade. Atop the bridge is a little,
12-foot long, 6-foot plus high tree fort that serves as the
timing tower, which contains an ancient set of timers, circa
probably 1965.
The clocks of unknown manufacture are simple. Rolling digit
columns to the thousandth of a second, as like with an old
car odometer, are all that’s on this machine. The numbers
spin like slots until the car gets to the top end and stops
at an e.t., no speed.
And the race course? An extension of the 30-foot width staging
lanes to a paint-chipped track of pebbled concrete, complete
with cracks, a couple of bitty chuckholes, and a big rubbery
swath down the center. A race driver goes by fans either planted
in four three-row 36-butt wooden bleachers, or hung out on
big log-separated chain length barriers.
On the left, an eighth-mile length of shade trees, most with
a ¼ of their bulk hanging over the track, and covering
a straight dirt walkway to the top end, where there is an
abandoned bleach wood booth, which, in the old days, would
house a guy who would signal which lane won. No electronics
in 1961.
The actual win lights are giant sun-faded metal Dr. Pepper
bottle caps (as in blown up ad props) with their backs turned
to the crowd, and big win lights in back.
The right side is strictly, trees, trucks and standing fans.
The big deal here is that while fans along the fence can stand
almost an arm’s length from the race cars, a careless
backward steps dumps you into a slanted tumbledown 10-foot
ditch, a depression that divides the trucks from the standers.
Burk and Kepner couldn’t. George Ray’s track
is one of the few, if not the only dragstrip, that runs strictly
heads up, thanks to a very logical, but difficult to explain
classification system. I’ll just say this – their
car classes would likely be what NHRA would’ve done
had Modified Eliminator and few other erased groups been retained.
Kepner had never won here, but managed to blitz the H/Pure
Stock Automatic class for a George Ray trophy. And dig this?
The trophy presentation? The 80-year-old Ray opens up an ancient
wood shed beneath the timing tower and the racer gets to pick
out from dozens of trophies, what bauble he wanted.
The Burkster didn’t do that well. In the first round,
the Whipple supercharger exploded and turned the silver paint
to black primer.
Me, I was mesmerized by the ambiance, the whole experience.
After 5 hours, I hated to leave the joint and go back to the
regular world of plastic badges, siege mentality, and overzealous
security.
The only good thing about the exit was that it’s not
likely the catfish farms and cotton fields are going to swallow
up old George’s place. It’s likely it’ll
be here 45 years from now.
Burk, Kepner, and I agreed, for quite awhile, we’ll
have an escape hatch ala “Being John Malkovich”
to slide through when the going gets too thoroughly modern.
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