The sport’s newest purpose-built racing venue has risen up out of the Chihuahuan desert near San Angelo, Texas seemingly overnight — its three partners determined to enact positive change in the racing culture in the area.
The new 85-acre Concho Valley Dragway is set to provide a dedicated space for motorsport enthusiasts and addressing the rising safety concerns around street racing in the area. The 1/8-mile concrete drag strip is the brainchild of local partners Justin Harvey, Terrence Harrison, and his stepbrother Jared Winger.
“We’ve been working tirelessly to bring this project to life,” said Winger. “We went from bare dirt to a nearly complete track in less than a month, and we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished.”
The Concho Valley Dragway features a 2,400-foot-long, 40-foot-wide all-concrete track, equipped with safety walls extending to the shutdown area. “Safety is a top priority for us,” Winger emphasized. “We’re building everything to meet the specifications required by the sanctioning bodies.”
San Angelo, located in West Texas, between Midland, Dallas, and San Antonio, has seen a surge in street racing activity. Winger, a past street racer himself, explained the motivation behind the project. “The street racing scene here has gotten out of control. There’s people going low fives on the street, and I was personally one of them, and it’s really dangerous. We were all sitting around at a bar one day and said why don’t we put in a little private road and we can have races out here. One thing led to another and we ended up building an entire racetrack,” Winger says with a laugh. “It went from a private asphalt road to a whole concrete drag strip. We needed a safe, controlled environment for racing, so we decided to build this track.”
The trio of partners broke ground this spring and within four weeks had the entire concrete strip poured and asphalt return road, pit area, and staging lanes in place.
Despite some resistance from a nearby neighborhood who attempted to shut the dragway down before it even got off the ground, the response from the broader community has been overwhelmingly positive. “We’ve run a couple of cash days races out here, and I’m not sure the neighbors even knew we were racing,” Winger says. “We’ve had tremendous support from local businesses and residents. The whole town has supported us from the get-go. We’ve secured over half a million dollars in…
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