The Hemi-powered drones Bruce Springsteen lionized in his 1975 hit song “Born to Run” ran a few miles west of Highway 9. The guys who took part in all those New Jersey stoplight drags also had a legal — and regal —place to play.
For decades, Old Bridge Township Raceway Park was one of drag racing’s premier venues, both for national-level competition and the regular guys who rumbled on Sunday afternoons. Today, it’s part of a motorsports complex that also offers drifting and track days on a separate road course, plus motocross.
And for a variety of reasons, some of them involving the facility’s location, drag racing at Raceway Park is no more.
However sad that reality is, Raceway Park leaves behind a quarter-mile legacy that dates to the 1960s, when it was first carved out of erstwhile farmland near the Revolutionary War village of Englishtown, which provided the track’s common shorthand name.
As it grew, buttressed by the New York City metro area, Raceway Park became a hugely successful strip that drew New Jersey’s biggest motorsport crowds annually to its NHRA national events. And as New Jersey boomed, Raceway Park’s unappreciative neighbors drew closer and closer to the track’s boundaries.
Raceway Park’s history is also the heritage of the Napoliello family, originally from Newark, who built the drag strip and successfully operated it across three generations. The family had started a heavy construction firm, Napp-Greco, and sold their share of the business in 1961.
The Napps, as they came to be known, started looking for a new place to park their capital. Vincent Napp Jr. and his brother Richard were already into hot cars, and raced them legally on the paved frontstretch of Old Bridge Speedway, which hosted drag racing back then.
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