Atco Dragway is Closing Effectively Immediately
New Jersey will be a lot less noisy as of this past Sunday, as Atco Dragway announced on Tuesday it was closing. That there would be no more racing at the track and the 2023 season was cancelled. The rapid closure stunned both competitors and fans, and comes after Old Bridge Township Raceway Park, aka Englishtown, closed its doors before the start of the 2018 NHRA season.
While Atco didn’t have recent national NHRA events on its calendar, it was a viable, 63-year-old quarter-mile strip and had its final contest just this past weekend. This closure mirrors that of 65-year-old Bandimere Speedway, which will shutter after a holiday event in November and December. Bandimere held its final and 43rd NHRA contest this past weekend, July 14-16.
There were rumblings of this closure three years ago, when an Illinois company stated it was considering the site for industrial usage, submitting an application to the New Jersey Vineland’s Commission in Waterford Township to redevelop the 180-acre site. The closure announcement appeared on Facebook just before 6PM ET, and was followed by conjecture that the track’s website had been hacked. It hadn’t.
“Effective immediately,” the post read in all capital letters, “Atco Dragway is permanently closed. We will not be open from this point on. The remainder of our schedule for 2023 will be canceled. Thank you all for your patronage and memories over the years. Special thank you to our 29th annual Pan American Nationals racers & crowd for making Atco Dragway’s last event the biggest and best one ever. This isn’t the end for import racing in the northeast! To all our staff, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts, for sticking it out and being the best in the business.”
Atco Dragway was the oldest drag strip in the Garden State, opening with fanfare in 1965. This writer, a Pennsylvania native, spent plenty of time at the track in its early years and Atco’s drag strip, along with Maple Grove Raceway, whetted the appetite for straight-line motorsports. This move leaves South New Jersey with no viable outlet for legal drag racing.
By Anne Proffit