Firesuit, gloves, harness, helmet and neck collar look a bit out of place on a four-cylinder dragster with street tires
Drainpipe starting line structure, flagman, and two-story tower without A/C demonstrate the basic nature of Eagle Field | Jim McCraw photos
In the tiny farming town of Firebaugh, California, there is a World War II Army Air Corps training facility called Eagle Field. It has been there since 1942 and there is so much aviation fuel, so many lubricants and other chemicals in the soil that, right in the middle of the huge San Joaquin Valley, one of the largest and most productive agricultural valleys in the world, there is hardly a blade of grass.
Eagle Field has changed hands many times from government to investor to farmer and back to government, and was rescued in 1980 by airplane aficionado Joe Davis, who has started assembling an aviation museum. In 2009, a group of local drag racers asked if they could use the one surviving runway to do some racing.
The racing has evolved into the Eagle Field Runway Drags, also known as the Fresno Dragways Reunion, held twice a year, in May and October, an event unlike any other in drag racing. Promoter and racer Rocky Phillips has been running the event ever since with his wife Tamara and an all-volunteer crew of 90 people.
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There is no Christmas Tree starting system… At the other end, a human judge sitting up high uses a checkered flag to indicate which lane the winning car was in. There are no trophies and no cash prizes.
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The strip is only an eighth of a mile long, to keep speeds down. They use soda syrup sprayed on the track surface to enhance traction.
They race with no electronic timing devices, no photocells to line up the cars evenly, no electronic scoring devices.
There is no Christmas Tree starting system. A human flagman (in this case either Earl Boyajian or Eves Tall-Chief), starts the two cars, which was the way it was done up until 1963 or so. At the other end, a human judge sitting up high uses a checkered flag to indicate which lane the winning car was in. There are no trophies and no cash prizes.
Much of the machinery here runs on naturally aspirated and supercharged Ford Flathead V8 engines, Ford four-cylinder engines, and Chevrolet/GMC inline six-cylinder engines. Some of those use Cragar, RaJo, Riley and Winfield overhead-valve conversions. Some of the cars are laughably ancient, and some are crude, but everyone seems to be having fun.
The drag strip is lined not with half-million-dollar motor homes but with 10 x 10 pop-up tents to fend off the 100-degree heat as three generations of families hang out, watch the races from folding chairs, and cook food. No alcohol is served or tolerated.
80-year-old General Jerry Le, brought his Model T wheelie truck and wowed the crowds
After eight years, the word has gotten out as to what fun this is, and racers come twice a year from Oregon, Washington and Nevada to participate. This year, 22 teams from the Estranged Car Club all came down from Oregon to race their gassers.
There is a Saturday evening cacklefest, with half a dozen supercharged, nitro-burning dragsters firing up one after another, this year featuring Sonny Messner’s restored Don Garlits Swamp Rat III dragster and the beautiful red dragster of ‘60s standout Joe Schubeck. A witness to the 2017 cacklefest was 95-year-old racing camshaft pioneer and special guest Ed Iskenderian.
Now that we’ve finally seen it for ourselves, walked on the sandy soil, eaten the dust and the drag strip food, heard the sounds, and seen all the sights, we award our five-star recommendation to the Eagle Field Runway Drags.
Yes, that is a 19th Century saloon spittoon sitting on top of the carburetor
The Beast. Jeff Atamian has been racing jet dragsters for 39 years with a perfect safety record. Amazing
You won’t find many drag strips that also house a military vehicle collection, but Eagle Field is one
The Evil Twin built by Eagle Field promotor Rocky Phillips and his son Lee uses two carbureted Chevy V-8 engines in tandem
This derelict, the Sprit Of The San Joaquin, is part of the Joe Davis museum collection
Local farmer Allan Clark, 77, owns this Gilmore Lion Special four-cylinder racer
The Brown family has been racing this ’52 Chevrolet for more than 50 years at California drag strips
This racer spent a fortune on the creation and application of a vinyl wrap dedicated to his son’s service in the 101st Airborne
Elmer ‘Unsprung’ Snyder was a fixture here for years, and his family still brings the dragster out to run on Unsprung Blvd
Mike Acquistapace’s lovely Anglia gasser was the only car to crash during the weekend, but he will be back in October
No, it’s not on fire, it’s Richard Brown’s turbodiesel 4-cylinder ’32 Ford coupe
This ’29 Ford Model A with a supercharged smallblock Chevrolet engine is typical of the quality of street rods here
Not a motor home in sight. Pop-ups full of families come to Eagle Field twice a year to enjoy old-time drag racing
The Heidt & Heidt B/Fuel Dragster leaked fluid onto the right slick and turned right, into the wall, at the starting line
Firesuit, gloves, harness, helmet and neck collar look a bit out of place on a four-cylinder dragster with street tires
This rear-engined contraption probably wouldn’t pass tech anywhere else, but was welcomed at Eagle Field
The original hangar survives, along with the administration building and officer quarters, and it’s full of cool stuff
Allan Clark’s street roadster sports a Cragar overhead-valve conversion
Gentleman Joe Schubeck brought his fabulous fuel dragster over from Henderson, Nevada, to show it and cackle it for the fans
This is the original Eagle Field sign, first erected in 1942, that sits next to the front gate at the airfield
It would have been nice to have six carburetors on Daryl Governal’s GM six-cylinder dragster engine, but six won’t fit
Here is a twin-engined, pit bike with a rear tire so wide it doesn’t need a kickstand
When you have turbodiesel torque available, you’d better have slicks big enough to handle it
You won’t see anything like this on the Fox broadcasts of NHRA drag racing. Light, simple and very cool
We have no idea what this is, or what it was, but we found it in the pits at Eagle Field
More evidence that this place was an active training base during World War II
We’ve been to hundreds of drags, but we’ve never seen four-at-a-time pit bike races until we went to Eagle Field
Veteran racer Stormy Byrd brought his gorgeous Revelation B/Fuel Modified Roadster to the party to race Evil Twin
In the pits, we spotted a John Deere single-cylinder engine running the refrigeration system on an ice cream truck
These two volunteers at the finish line use flag signals to show the crowd which car got to the finish line first
Jim McCraw has been writing about cars, motorcycles, design, technology, car people and racing for 50 years, in such publications as Hot Rod Deluxe, Super Chevy, Muscle Mustangs, Road & Track, Car and Driver, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Penthouse, Winding Road, The Mercedes-Benz Star, AutoWeek, The New York Times, and a number of European publications. He was executive editor of Motor Trend, editor of Hot Rod and Super Stock. He co-holds the record for the drive from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, 96:22, and has run in major events such as the Mille Miglia Storica in Italy, Goodwood, the California Mille, the Colorado Grand, the New England 1000, Forza Mille, and four One Lap Of America competitions He owns a pristine Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan.
