IHRA Track Profile: Farmington Dragway, Mocksville, N.C.

Western North Carolina is known around the country as a NASCAR hotbed with an overwhelming majority of the NASCAR teams based around Charlotte, local NASCAR racetracks throughout the region and Charlotte Motor Speedway located in Concord. Drag strips, however, are also bountiful in North Carolina, and International Hot Rod Association (IHRA) member track Farmington Dragway in Mocksville just west of Winston-Salem and northeast of Charlotte is one of the players.

"Piedmont Dragway near Greensboro, Mooresville Dragway, Rockingham, Wilkesboro, the Charlotte Motor Speedway track – there are several down in South Carolina; they're all over the place, really," Farmington Dragway co-owner Buzz Simpson said. "It's popular for the same reason stock car racing is popular around here – people grew up around cars, racing and hot rods.

"It's part of the community here; for me, the best part is being around the drivers, the comraderies among the drivers and the people at the track that work there every day. It's a tightly-knit group."

"North Carolina has more drag strips per square mile than any other state," Farmington Dragway race director and former co-owner Mark Joyce said. "Texas is bigger, and they have more drag strips. But per square mile, North Carolina has more drag strips – it's a hotbed. In North Carolina, it's motorsports period, whether it's NASCAR Cup Series, local NASCAR tracks, go karting or drag racing for sure."

Indeed it is, and Farmington Dragway has been hosting bracket racing events since it was founded in 1963 as a quarter-mile track. Over the years, they've raced Farmington at a quarter mile, a fifth mile and an eighth mile as they do today. The IHRA Summit SuperSeries races at Farmington with excellent turnouts in all classes – especially Top Eliminator.

"We're a down-to-earth bracket track with good Friday night programs," Joyce added. "We have good rentals like the Mopar show and the Volkswagen show – we've been doing both for more than 30 years. We have Pro Mod shows and Pro Stock shows, but we're just hardcore bracket racers.

"It's a good location that's close to Virginia, South Carolina and Tennessee, so you pull quite a few racers from those areas. For spectators, it's seven miles off the interstate so it's not bad that way either. We have the Stick Shift Nationals coming up Memorial Day weekend, a Thanksgiving race and a flea market at the end of the year so we do a lot of different events through the year that work pretty well for us."

But one of Farmington's biggest events is set for June 9-11 when the IHRA Summit Sportsman National Championship comes to town. The national championships will be determined using points claims from the best seven of the first 10 events the racer attends. There are no "divisions." Competitors are scored against each other using a national points system. They may race at whatever event they choose without limitations based upon regional boundaries. Drivers racing in the season-long competition can win up to $15,000 for a national championship with a chance to win a fabulous vacation on the island of Aruba.

"It won't be just another race weekend," Simpson said. "It's gonna be pretty big. Everybody's excited about it; we're just praying for good weather. The weather has been so lousy this year, but if we can get some good weather that weekend, we should have a lot of cars here."

Farmington Dragway is just one cog in the massive North Carolina Motorsports wheel, yet it's one that's been turning for more than five decades. As has been the case since the track opened in 1963, the ownership group will continue investing and making their part of western North Carolina's Motorsports hotbed the best it can possibly be.

"We plan to do some paving," Simpson added. "We just put in a new timing system. We want to keep it up and maintain it. We feel the more modern we can make it, the more people will come, and we're dedicated to doing that. It's just a matter of making the budget do what we want it to do."