From the great news announced this week in Reading — Pennsylvania, that is — we switch gears to Redding. California, that is.

Once the world center of drag racing, the marriage between the sport and the Golden State has long since ended, progress wiping many legendary facilities from existence and leaving but a handful of strips in the nation’s most populous state. But a pair of grassroots racers are working to ensure the longevity of a track that has outlasted many of the long-closed giants in the state like Lions and Orange County and Fremont, bringing it up to present-day standards and providing locals with a high-quality venue for acceleration contests for years to come.

The Redding Dragstrip, located in the very northern part of California, between the San Francisco Bay area and the Washington state line, is believed to be the oldest continuously NHRA-sanctioned dragstrip in the nation. When the 1/4-mile racing facility came up for grabs, racers and promoters Jesse Adams and his business partner, Tony Trimp, already with a connection to the facility, jumped at the opportunity.

Shirlene Bramson, the previous owner and operator at Redding, had arranged a unique 501(c)(3) non-profit agreement with the city, wherein the city government owns the land and assumes the property tax costs, leaving the dragstrip and its structures and equipment as a separate entity. Bramson decided at the close of last season she wanted to focus her time on her real estate business, and she didn’t have to look far to find a successor.

“We did a track rental there during Covid and it did really well, and so we kept doing our T&A Race Club track rentals at multiple racetracks,” Adams says. “Last October, she called and said she was ready to sell the track and offered for us to buy it and take over. She didn’t want to see the track close, and so we were her first call. I called Tony and he said, ‘let’s do it,’ and we jumped on it. It didn’t take us five minutes to make a decision.”

The fact that the city owns the land made it financially feasible for Adams and Trimp to become track owners. “We couldn’t afford the property taxes in California on something like that,” Adams says.

Photos courtesy Heather Nickles

“Tony and I own it, and we’re 50/50 partners. All we had to purchase from Shirlene was all of the equipment, including the timing system, the track prep machinery, essentially everything associated with drag racing,” Adams says, going on to explain, “The cool part is, the county is very much in favor of the racetrack and motorsports, and there’s not a lot to do in the town of Redding, so people up there just flock to the racetrack. They are there week in and week out, a lot of the same people, all the time. So with all the support from the city, and the county, and the neighboring airport, it goes really smooth.”

The agreement wasn’t finalized until January 1, but Adams and Trimp got to work right away making significant improvements to the venue.

“They originally started racing on this track in 1948, and it became an NHRA-sanctioned dragstrip in 1953. And from ’53 to now, it’s always been NHRA-sanctioned,” Adams tells. “At some point, probably in the ‘60s, they put in steel guardrails with wooden posts, and there has been some improvement on that over the years, but a lot of guys haven’t wanted to race there because of the steel guardrails. The track was 46-feet wide of asphalt and concrete, and in the right lane there was six feet of dirt and grass before you got to the guardrail. The left lane was about 18-inches of grass and dirt. A lot of the surface was World War II-era, and it was just deteriorating. So the first thing we did, J.F Shea Co. donated 4,200-feet of concrete K-rail, so we put concrete walls from the waterboxes all the way down to 1,800-feet on both sides of the track. This is huge, and it will bring a lot of people back. But we also poured concrete from the burnout boxes to past the finish line…1,500-feet of all brand new concrete, guardrail to guardrail.We also added 500-feet of new asphalt in the shutdown area.”

The largely dirt, gravel, and grass pit area was upgraded with 3-acres of new asphalt to give racers nice, marked, paved parking spaces. The hope is to add more paved parking next year.

“We felt like if we took this track over to run it as status quo, we were not going to bring more racers in. We’re going to make some money on the few feature events a year, but it’s not going to be a real draw to anybody. So we decided to spend a lot of money and do it right. And it’s going to be the premier track in California,” Adams contends. “What we have here is going to be the best track West of the Rocky Mountains except for Las Vegas. There are some other tracks, but their management style and their approach is totally different from ours. Ours is based on how to make races better for racers.”

A 240×80-foot burnout pit was built next to the left lane, and a thousand people showed up to watch an event there in February…900 more than Adams and Trimp were expecting. A no-prep race was also held two weeks ago to christen the virgin concrete, during which a raffle was held to benefit the track upgrades to conduct the two very first burnouts on the pristine white concrete surface. “You saw tire-smoke, the black streaks behind them, and nothing but fresh concrete ahead of them,” Adams says of the scene that day.

Located directly adjacent to the dragstrip is the Redding Municipal Airport, which provides service to five West coast hubs. The airport, as Adams explains, is a benefit to the existence of the raceway, but also provides the only caveat to what is otherwise a dream scenario for he, Trimp, and the racers in the long-term.

“Back in 1982, a new master plan was drawn up for the airport next door. Eventually, they want the airport to expand enough for them to put a parallel runway in, and when they do that, the dragstrip will go away, because it’s in the way of where they want the runway to be,” Adams explains. “We don’t see that happening for seven years, more like 10. But our goal here is to be able to fully operate for a minimum of five years, and if we can get eight, nine, 10, or longer, that’s great. As long as we can get five years in we will be super happy…we should be able to have all of our debt paid off by the end of this year, and then we’re into making money again. Ultimately, if there’s infrastructure growth and we have to close the track, the city has floated the idea of offering us another piece of property further to the east, and we would look into building a brand new dragstrip. But it’s hard to tell in California with environmental regulations how drag racing is going to be in another 10 years. So we’re on a five-year plan, and we’ll be happy to get that in.”

“We’re not expecting to get shut down early. Anything can happen, we knew it was a risk and we accepted that risk, but I don’t think we’ll have any problems,” Adams says, adding the airport runs 24 hours a day, there’s a lifeflight next door, as well as a business park, so the area is fully industrial and unlikely to be effected by residential encroachment. It also does not have a curfew. “We still want to be good neighbors,” he adds.

Still known legally as Redding Dragstrip, Adams and Trimp have renamed the facility Redding Motorsports Park, to account for the burnout pit, the neighboring karting track, the super-moto club that also uses the kart track, and motocross track. The pair are also working to bring a monster truck show in this summer, adding to the entertainment value of the facility.

The kind of win-win partnership that can exist between a city government and a racetrack is on full display in Redding. Adams and Trimp intend to partner with local law enforcement to align with the track as an educational tool for would-be street racers caught in the act.

“If they catch a kid doing burnouts in a parking lot, instead of them writing him a ticket, our goal is to have them extend a warning, and hand them a free pass to the dragstrip…tell them to take it where they belong. We can do data-tracing, so the Redding P.D. is all about that. There are also groups that want to no-prep race with a flashlight start and no timing system like a street race, and anything we can do to help get guys to not race on the street is what we want to do,” Adams says.

Adams and Trimp will host their first major event — the largest on the annual calendar, in fact — April 30 with Kool April Nights, the finale to a city event known as Kool April Nights, featuring nitro Funny Cars and a host of heads-up racing machines.