Memorial Day drags bring statewide racing tradition to Hilo strip
Hilo's Memorial Day drags turned the county strip into a statewide meet of racers, families and loud machines. The Pana‘ewa track still anchors Big Island motorsports.
A county strip with statewide pull
Burnouts, smoky launches and junior dragsters turned the Hilo Drag Strip, also known as the Pana‘ewa Drag Strip, into one of the Big Island’s loudest Memorial Day traditions. The 7th annual Reynold M. Crivello Memorial Day Drags ran May 23-24, 2026 as a two-day IHRA-sanctioned event, drawing racers from across Hawaii to a track operated by the County of Hawaii.
That mix of local ownership and islandwide reach is part of why the meet still matters. The strip, which opened in 1978, is not a showpiece built for a single weekend. It is a working county venue that carries some of the biggest dates on the island racing calendar, especially Memorial Day drags and the Tommy Thompson Labor Day Drags.
What filled the lanes
The racing itself showed how broad the sport has become at Hilo. The images from the weekend captured a Dodge Challenger doing a burnout, an altered dragster, the Bogeyman Toyota Corolla, a junior dragster, a Chevrolet Vega and a bike launch, along with other drivers waiting for green lights or heating their tires at the line. The field made clear that the meet was not limited to one class, one generation or one kind of machine.
A community announcement for the 2026 event listed High Roller, Working Man, Import/VW and Junior Dragsters, along with a new IHRA Race for the Rod category. That spread matters because it reflects the way the Hilo strip works as a crossroads for island racing, where newcomers, veterans, imports, bikes and bracket cars can all fit on the same weekend card.
The people behind the tower
Race director Keith Aguiar Sr. was visible in the control tower, helping run the event while the lanes filled and the timing equipment did its work. Tribune-Herald coverage has described Aguiar as a fixture at the track for more than 30 years, and his presence underscores how much of Hilo drag racing depends on long institutional memory as much as horsepower.
The same older coverage also portrayed racers as self-funded, often self-trained and usually their own mechanics. That reality gives the Memorial Day meet a different feel from a commercial show, because the cars on the strip are the product of years of home garages, spare parts and hard-earned tuning rather than corporate backing. It also helps explain why the event draws such loyal participation from the Big Island Auto Club and the Hawaii Drag Racing League, where the people who race are often the same people who build and maintain what they drive.
Weather remains one of the biggest variables at the Hilo Drag Strip. In earlier coverage, Aguiar said rain can wipe out maybe 30 or 40 percent of scheduled events at the track, a reminder that the sport here depends on dry pavement, good timing and a little luck from the sky. That makes every clean Memorial Day weekend more valuable to racers who travel, prep and pay their own way to get to the line.
Why Memorial Day still carries weight
The Memorial Day meet is more than a photo-ready weekend of smoke and speed. Earlier results coverage shows how serious the racing can be: in 2015, Chad Fiesta of Pepeekeo won Bracket 1 in a Nova with a 10.69-second pass at 129 mph and also claimed the American Hot Rod Association’s Legends Trophy. That kind of result gives the holiday meet a competitive edge that goes well beyond spectacle.
For Hilo, the event also works as a reminder of what a county-run motorsports facility can still do when it is used well. The strip gives the island a place where families, mechanics and speed enthusiasts can gather around a shared tradition that is older than many of the racers now staging at the line. It keeps a distinct part of Big Island culture visible, and it does so with local control, familiar names and a racing community that keeps showing up.
The 7th annual Reynold M. Crivello Memorial Day Drags reinforced that role. With racers coming from across Hawaii, multiple classes on the card and Aguiar again running the show from the tower, the Hilo Drag Strip proved that it still functions as both a competition venue and a community anchor. In a county where many sports stories center on fields, gyms or ocean water, this strip remains one of the clearest markers of how Big Island motorsports continues to define itself.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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