History New Jersey Timing Association Part 7

New Jersey Timing Association (cont)

Drag racing was starting to appear at other locations accessible to New Jersey rodders. Convair Field in Allentown, Pennsylvania, was a success and in 1958 NASCAR began drag racing at an old WWII airfield in Montgomery, New York. Many of the clubs that had been in the NJTA from the outset dropped out, presumably because drag racing was now readily accessible to New Jersey rodders. But the NJTA continued its quest for another New Jersey drag strip. In 1959, members Al Brown and Pete VanIderstine met with the owners of Old Bridge Stadium, a paved oval track in the community of Old Bridge, near Englishtown. It was in use for traditional stock car racing. (This track is not to be confused with the Englishtown's Raceway Park drag strip which came later and which is still in operation). Al and Pete proposed drag racing on Saturday nights. The stadium owners, brothers Harold and Sol Edelman, accepted the proposal and thus began a decade long successful partnership. Art Grotyohann, a founding member of the NJTA, took the lead in managing the Old Bridge drags and continued in that role until racing ended in the late 1960s. The track was typical of stock car tracks and had a front straight where there were grandstands. A finish line was painted at the mid-point of the straight and a starting line was laid out as far back into the fourth turn as was possible. This posed two problems. The car in the outside lane had to pull forward of the starting line and back almost into the guard rail to be in starting position. The other problem was that this point on the track was banked and staged cars were not level and would roll across the starting line if drivers weren't using their brakes. Relying on the drivers to use brakes really didn't work so we used "car holders". Guys would hold onto the car to prevent it from rolling across the starting line. This sounds crazy and was probably dangerous but the practice continued for years. And there were stories about drivers who after losing a race would complain that the car holders held on to their car too long thus causing them to lose. Nobody took these complaints seriously. The stadium owners were very happy being in the drag racing business and thought they could boost their revenues by having drag racing on a weekday evening. It was on these weekday races that we tried a stunt to make the evening more interesting - LeMans starts. The two cars would be positioned halfway to the finish line. The drivers would be flagged off of the starting line and would run to their cars. A staffer assured that seatbelts were fasted and the cars would start up and race the relatively short distance to the finish. Some of the fastest cars were difficult to start and would sometimes lose to obviously slower cars. Weekday racing didn't last long because participation and spectator attendance never sufficiently developed. The NJTA membership was rather cool to this idea anyway and welcomed its demise.

The length of the track at Old Bridge Stadium was never formally announced and there was much speculation over the years about what the length might be. Unfortunately, that length cannot be established even now due to different numbers from credible people, imprecise scaling information on old aerial photos found on the Internet, and the fact that the speedway no longer exists. Some racers thought the track was an eighth-mile but it was clearly much shorter. Don Raleigh, owner of the well-known Don's Speed Shop in Metuchen, ran his dragster at Old Bridge Stadium several times and finally decided he wanted to know the length so one night he measured it. He reported 318 feet. Art Grotyohann, the track manager for its entire existence once wrote an article about Old Bridge Stadium Drags for Eastern Drag News in which he gave the length as 422 feet. And one interpretation of questionable aerial photo scaling information yielded a length in the range of 350 feet.

Recording miles-per-hour on such a short track was a challenge. The timers were designed to use a 132-ft. trap centered on the finish line. This was unfeasible at such a short track as Old Bridge. A car would have to accelerate for 66 feet past the finish line for an accurate MPH speed and this cut dangerously into the admittedly short shutdown distance. Indeed, over the years several cars did hit the guard rail on the first turn. This MPH timing problem was mitigated by making the speed trap 13.2 ft. The clock operator who converted the clock's trap time to MPH by using a chart would simply move the decimal point one place.

About this time the NJTA started to get requests from groups wanting to conduct drag races but who were in need of timing equipment. We accepted most of these requests. A new drag strip in Flemington, New Jersey, opened in the spring of 1962 with the NJTA handling timing and all operations. Most requests for timing or full operations were for Sunday races so we could close Old Bridge on Saturday night, pack up the timers, and drive to the new track in time for Sunday morning. Amazingly, there were always NJTA members willing to do this. Al Brown is the most memorable of these and he even timed racing at Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, by himself on several occasions. In a few more years we ordered more timers so we could time different tracks on the same day which we sometimes did.

Island Dragway in Great Meadows, New Jersey, was another new track in need of both timers and
experienced drag meet crews. After an initial meeting between the Island Dragway partners and NJTA representatives Al Brown and this author, an agreement was reached in which the NJTA would time and run their meets. This included inspections, classifications, conducting eliminations, announcing, etc. We did everything but the food concessions. And Art Grotyohann was again a key guy in getting Island Dragway up and running. After a year or two in operation the owners were well up on the learning curve and decided they could run drag races on their own. So they bought their own timers and hired their own crews, some of whom were NJTA members who had worked at the track since the beginning. This track is still in operation today. Several NHRA records have been set there over the years including the first official 200 MPH run on August 2, 1964 by Don Garlits. The role of the NJTA in the beginning is all but forgotten.

Drag racing continued at Old Bridge Stadium until the late 1960s. Membership in the NJTA had dwindled by then and after racing ended at Old Bridge Stadium the NJTA was largely inactive. Some time in the 1970s the decision was made to dissolve the Association. Many of the founding members of the Association who were the driving force for most of its existence are no longer with us. Tom Collow, Art Grotyohann, and Al Brown have passed away.

The New Jersey Timing Association is gone but forty years after its dissolution drag racing is alive
and well in New Jersey as evidenced by drag racing at Raceway Park in Englishtown, Island Dragway in Great Meadows, and Atco Raceway in Atco. But perhaps the best evidence of the survival of hot rodding in New Jersey is The Race of Gentlemen held each spring in Wildwood at the New Jersey Shore.

 

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Thank you for the history lesson! It simply doesn't get better than an account from someone who was there. So much has passed in drag racing since that time, all of it owing to the enthusiasm and effort of early organizers like those in the NJTA.