Drag racing trivia: name the world’s first commercial drag strip.

If you answered the Santa Ana Drag Strip, you would be correct.

Santa Ana, located in the Southern California region that gave birth to this great sport of ours, is part of the Los Angeles metro area that was the hot bed of hot rodding and early organized drag racing, and so the fact that it plays a part in history doesn’t come as that much of a surprise.

Images credit: LIFE Magazine

The Santa Ana Drag Strip operated on what is now Orange County’s John Wayne Airport, and was headed up by the legendary CJ “Pappy” Hart, who masterminded the races in Santa Ana out of his love for the sport to give his fellow auto enthusiasts a fun, safe, and legal place to enjoy their hobby.

Hart established the Santa Ana Drag Strip along with his then neighbor Creighton Hunter on an unused runway at the Orange County Airport and conducted drag racing events on Sundays from 1950 through 1959. Within the first month of operation, Hunter sold his interest in the track to Hart, who owned a gas station in Santa Ana at the time. He would then run the track with his wife Peggy, who not only helped in the strips operation, but raced – and won – on a regular basis with her ’33 Willys Coupe. Hart charged the small sum of 50 cents to race or watch at Santa Ana.

“There’s been drag racing since cars were invented,” Hart said in a 2001 interview in National DRAGSTER, “but I guess they say I invented drag racing because I was the first one to have a commercial strip. There was one in [Goleta, Calif.], but they charged no fee at the time. I saw a need to get people to stop racing on the streets; that was dangerous.”

According to Hart, the decision to race to a quarter mile length was borrowed from thoroughbred racing, and the installation of an electronic timing system was pieced together from parts from an old Victrola. And because these early races in Santa Any took place even before Wally Parks had founded the NHRA, it was up to “Pappy” to institute some of the early rules, including the regulation of axle ratios, years, makes, engine displacements, and safety regulations on things like roll bars.

During this period of the 1950’s, the Orange County Airport saw little in the way of business, with the only airline flights being those of Bonanza’s flights between Los Angeles and Phoenix by way of San Diego. Thus drag racing was able to commence on the property. But in 1959, with air traffic increasing, Orange County forced the end of drag racing in Santa Ana.

“Pappy” passed away in June 2004 after a life of devotion to the sport he loved. During his time, legions of drag racing fans came to know him as one of the grand old men in the sport. His Santa Ana venture is credited with spring boarding the sport into existence as young hot rodders traveled from all across the country to see his organized style of racing, eventually creating a nation of timing associations. Following Santa Ana’s closure, Hart went on to work for the NHRA Safety Safari, traveling the country and greeting racers and fans alike at every stop along the way, but despite his contributions to the sport in the decades that ensued, it was perhaps his time spent perched in the wooden timing stand on the Orange County Airport runway that shined the brightest.