What was Beeline Dragway?
In the early 1960s the Valley’s hot-rodders needed a strip, and a local racer named Jim Rogers found one. He leased land from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community along the Beeline Highway, State Route 87, about a mile north of Mesa and twenty-five minutes east of Scottsdale, and laid two quarter-mile asphalt lanes. Ground was broken on July 20, 1963, and Beeline Dragway opened that fall.
For more than a decade it was home to the American Hot Rod Association’s Winternationals, one of the sport’s big winter meets. The names were the biggest in drag racing: Don “Big Daddy” Garlits, “Dandy” Dick Landy, Tom McEwen and Shirley “Cha-Cha” Muldowney. In January 1971 Garlits ran his revolutionary rear-engine Swamp Rat XIV there, by Dragzine’s account, weeks before it won at Pomona.
Then the crowds thinned. Racing was on television, and Firebird Raceway opened near Chandler. Beeline had stopped running by January 1979. Its graffiti-covered timing tower stood alone for thirty years, until the Community cleared the site in the 2010s.
The strip and its end
What it was. Two asphalt lanes, grandstands and pits on about 63 acres of leased Community land, with a gravel pit to the north.
The Winternationals. The AHRA, a rival to the larger NHRA, held its Winternationals at Beeline from the 1960s into the 1970s. Dave Strickler won Top Stock in 1964. The 1971 meet in late January is remembered for Garlits’s new car; Wikipedia’s account of Garlits puts its very first runs at Lions in California, so Beeline’s claim to the debut depends on which you count.
The end. Phoenix New Times, which photographed the ruins in 2012, puts the closing in 1975 and blames declining interest and TV. An EPA report on the cleanup, written with the Community, says operations ceased in January 1979 and that the strip was demolished in the 1980s, with the debris dumped in the gravel pit.
The cleanup. The Community used federal brownfields money to investigate the site, remove asbestos and tear down what was left, finishing in 2015. It plans to keep the land as open space for cultural use, and the old gravel pit became an environmental education garden.
The sources, and the disagreements
Main sources: Benjamin Leatherman’s 2012 Phoenix New Times piece on the ruins, which names Jim Rogers and the racers; Wikipedia; Dragzine’s 2011 look back at the 1971 Winternationals; the EPA’s 2015 brownfields factsheet; and the Community’s own brownfields program page.
Where they disagree:
- The builder’s name. Jim Rogers (New Times) or Rodgers (racing memorabilia).
- The closing. 1975 (New Times, Wikipedia), January 1979 (EPA), 1980 (a historical-map project), or the early 1980s after a dispute between the landowners and the track’s operators (an older Dragzine article). We give “by 1979.”
- The tower. Standing in 2012; the Community’s report of demolition by 2015 means it’s very likely gone. We haven’t seen a later photograph either way.
- “TV Tommy” Ivo, often named among Beeline’s racers, isn’t placed there by any source we found.
Why it matters
Beeline is part of how the Valley’s car culture grew, from hot-rodders on Sunday afternoons to the collector-car auctions that now fill WestWorld every January. It was also an early commercial use of Community land, long before the casinos, Salt River Fields and the Pavilions. The land is open space again, the Community’s to use as it chooses.