D.I. COLUMNIST
On the Road
with Van Abernethy
Iowa’s Cedar Falls Raceway
has a rich history dating back
to 1964 when they first broke
ground on the facility, eventually
opening its doors for business the
following year. The track was first
called Northeast Iowa Timing Association,
better known as NEITA,
which also served as its original
sanction before switching over to
the nationally known IHRA and
most recently NHRA, which the
track joined three years ago.
Not surprisingly, the track was
originally constructed as a quartermile
facility, with a shocking amount
of shutdown. “We’ve got a quartermile
racing surface and a half-mile
of shutdown!” says
track manager Justin
Kruse, whose parents,
Joe and Deb Kruse,
bought the track
from Scott Gardner’s
group in 2014.
Over time, as preference
shifted from
the quarter-mile to
the eighth-mile, Cedar
Falls has adjusted
by contesting all their
bracket point races
on the eighth-mile,
saving a select few
events for the timehonored
distance of
1,320 feet.
Cedar Falls is also
gaining notoriety in
the region as a place
to come for some
big-money bracket
racing, namely the
SFG Promotions
events. “We’d like
to set the precedence of being the
big-money bracket track in Iowa,”
Kruse explains. Cedar Falls and SFG
have collaborated in recent years
to present races paying as much as
$50,000 to win, along with multiple
20-granders.
As for their marquee fan favorite
event, look no further than the
ultra-popular Night of Fire, which
was extended in 2020 to a two-day
affair that featured nitro nostalgia
cars, Fuel Altereds, Ozark Mountain
Super Shifters, the Shockwave Jet
Truck, plus twin $5k events for the
bracket racing contingent.
The Kruse family is
intent on improving
the overall facility and
growing their local
sport, while continuing
to capture the family atmosphere
that the track
is famous for. “Multigeneration
families still
gather and race here and
that’s the atmosphere we want to
continue carrying on,” Kruse says.
Recently, Justin and his family
stumbled upon some of the track’s
earliest timing equipment in one of
their buildings and were astounded
at how far the track had advanced
from the days of hand-written tickets,
etc. “Every year at our Mopar
race, we also hold a NEITA reunion
to celebrate the track’s rich history,
and those guys who raced here back
in the 1960s and 1970s will sit and
talk for hours about the old days,”
smiles Justin, who recalls how he
himself made his very first pass
down a dragstrip right here at Cedar
Falls in 2004, racing a 1983 Olds
Cutlass with a mild tuneup before
making a giant leap into a Super
Pro dragster.
Another colorful member of the
Cedar Falls family is tech director
Steve Drinkwine, a self-described
East Coast Italian boy
who relocated to Iowa
and treasures the love
and friendship of the
Midwest racing scene.
“Test and Tune sessions
are the best because
you’re gonna get to see
the best of the best and
the worse of the worse!”
he chuckles.
Just when Drinkwine thought
he’d seen everything, a guy recently
came rolling up through the staging
lanes driving a 18-wheeler tractor.
Another night someone showed up
driving a creepy-looking hearse! “I
said to the guy, ‘You better not have
a body in there!’” Thankfully, he did
not.
Among the most memorable
racers I met while at Cedar Falls
was Waterloo, Iowa, resident Tom
Roschen, whose beautiful 1974
Plymouth Duster is featured as this
month’s column photo. Back in 1975,
Roschen was serving in the military
while stationed at Fort Campbell,
Kentucky, when he bought his classy
Mopar from the original owner, who
bought it new the year before.
“A short time later a guy came in
the barracks bragging about how
fast his car would run at the local
dragstrip in Clarksville, Tennessee,
so naturally I had to take the
Duster out there and see what it’d
run!” recalls Roschen. “I was pretty
much hooked instantly...this was 44
years ago.”
Obviously, the car was his daily
driver when this all started, but then
Roschen got fancy and began transporting
it to the track with a tow bar
before eventually building a homemade
open trailer. All these years
later the car has been back-halved
(entirely by Roschen) three times
and he now hauls the car around in
a nice enclosed trailer. The factory
360ci engine has long since been
replaced with a 528ci big-block
Mopar powerplant.
Amazingly, the car
still sports the factory
paint, stripes
and vinyl top, all of
which still show extremely
well.
Roschen has relocated
a number of
times over the years
and his trusty Plymouth
has gone with
him through all of
life’s challenges and
changes. He says he
couldn’t imagine his
life without the satisfaction
of drag racing,
and he’s entered his
Plymouth at no less
than a dozen tracks
around the country.
Heck, he even met
his wife, Vicky, while
racing right here at
Cedar Falls!
While in Iowa, I
heard stories from seasoned pros
like Roschen, as well as the hopes
and dreams of people like Mike Benson,
another Waterloo resident, who
was exactly one week away from
entering his first bracket race ever!
While some folks are counting
the seconds until the next NEITA
reunion so they can relive the past,
others are moments away from
bumping into the beams for the
first time and with hearts pounding,
watching in slow motion as the yellow
bulb begins to make its descent,
thus creating an addiction they’ll
not soon kick. DI
50 | Drag Illustrated | DragIllustrated.com Issue 159