1971. The NHRA World Finals. Don Garlits on the Burlington Road strip.
The national drag racing press converged on Amarillo for three days and the quarter mile of Panhandle concrete was, for those three days, the center of something. Garlits — "Big Daddy," the man who redesigned the rear-engine dragster after one of his front-engine cars exploded and took three of his toes — ran this track. The times and the money and the attention were real.
The strip had opened in 1959. It was everything a drag strip needs to be: flat, straight, isolated enough that the noise doesn't bother anyone, with enough clear sky above it that the timing lights read clean in any weather. The Texas Panhandle is, structurally, an ideal location for a drag strip. There are no hills to block the horizon. The air pressure is consistent. The winds run predictable. You point the car east and you go.
On June 23, 1968, during a race meeting, a Cessna 172 crashed at the track and killed a spectator named Julia Archuleta.
Light aircraft were part of the scene — owners flew in, money flew in, the kind of people who owned drag strips in 1968 were the kind of people who owned small planes. This is documented. This happened before the NHRA came to Amarillo. It happened three years before the World Finals, when the track was still building itself into something.
The same qualities that make a drag strip work make other things work.
A drug plane needs a flat approach. It needs a long clear sightline. It needs to know that the land for miles around is empty enough that an unscheduled landing at two in the morning doesn't generate a phone call to anyone. It needs, ideally, a strip of pavement that is already built, in a county where the sheriff has other things to worry about, in a corridor that the DEA has documented — in their own internal reports — as handling thirty-one percent of all interstate marijuana seizures.
Interstate 40 through the Texas Panhandle was called Corridor B.
In July of 1989, a plane went down 110 miles southeast of here at Childress Municipal — came in too heavy to make the farm roads, forced to land where someone would see it. Eight hundred and eighty-two kilograms of cocaine. The pilot was Robert Joseph Belmar. He was transported to Amarillo for the magistrate hearing because Amarillo was the federal hub.
The DEA Air Wing established a Fort Worth operations center in 1986 specifically to fly surveillance over the Panhandle. They were looking for planes that behaved the way a drag strip owner's plane might behave.
The man who ran the track through the NHRA Finals era was named Earnest Walker. He organized a seventy-five-car parade down Polk Avenue when the World Finals came to Amarillo. He recruited the governor. He was the public face of the strip at its peak.
What happened to Earnest Walker after 1973 is not in any indexed database.
The public ownership records for this strip have a twelve-year gap — 1974 through 1985, the exact years the DEA was building its surveillance infrastructure across the Panhandle, the exact years Corridor B was moving product, the exact years the flat land and the straight pavement and the remote location were most useful for purposes that had nothing to do with elapsed time.
The Lamberson and Dutcher families bought the strip in 2011. They run it straight. They joined the NHRA Member Track Network in 2025. The strip is active. The timing lights work. You can run it on a Saturday.
The pavement is the same pavement.
Where Earnest Walker went after 1973. What is in the twelve-year gap in the ownership records. The deed chain at Potter County that would tell the whole story — and what the Globe-Times archive has on file. Act Two has what the indexes don't.
[$0.99 · inkwell.wiki/dragway]
Next: The Panhandle has always been a corridor. For bison. For cattle. For Route 66. For this. The center of Route 66 is 40 miles west. The Midpoint Cafe has been there since 1928. Look for the mark on the back of the mileage sign.