Trace Adkins had it right when he sang “timing is everything.” 

That sentiment explains how drag racing is going to resume on Long Island, New York, in August. The town board of Riverhead recently approved the use of Calverton Executive Airpark for four drag racing events, over eight days, on the shorter of the facility’s runways. The grand opening is set for Aug. 21.

The racing, which will be sanctioned by NHRA and contested on an eighth-mile distance, will be the culmination of a 17-year effort to bring drag racing back to Long Island. There hasn’t been legal, sanctioned racing on the island since Westhampton Drag Strip closed after the 2003 season and was replaced by a senior living complex.

Until now, people wanting to test their cars’ straight-line speed had to drive three hours to Great Meadows, N.J., or pursue the dangerous, illegal practice of racing on the streets.

The latter was a factor in the town board’s approval for racing, said John Montecalvo, a three-time mountain-motor Pro Stock world champion, a resident of Center Moriches on Long Island, and one of the driving forces behind the resurrection of racing closer to home -- that, and timing.

“Basically, I’d say the prior town boards were anti-motorsports,” Montecalvo said. “I sent a Facebook message to (supervisor of Riverhead) Yvette Aguiar in January about a motorsports park that was being built out west … and on 10 ‘clock on a Sunday night, I get a message back from her ‘we need to talk, I agree this would be good for our town. Call my assistant on Monday morning.’ 

“I’ve heard this before -- ‘call my assistant;’ I’m not going to get anywhere with that. But I called her assistant, we set up a meeting right away, and she (Aguiar) is the real deal. We finally got a supervisor and a town board that recognizes the value of racing. There’s a lot of street racing going on here, and now, we’ve got a place that gives kids a place to race safely.”

That said, the drag-racing effort led by Peter Scalzo wasn’t given carte blanche. Racing will this year be limited to that abbreviated schedule (Aug. 21-22, 22-29, and Sept. 4-5 and 11-12). Cars covering the eighth must be equipped with mufflers, they can’t go quicker than 6.0 seconds, and they can’t top 115 mph.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of Challengers, Mustangs, the import guys -- stuff like that,” Montecalvo said. “It’s going to be good just to get the kids off the street and to provide some wholesome entertainment.”

Starting out slowly will give Aguiar and the town board a chance to assess the pros and cons of racing’s return. 

“This is basically all new,” Montecalvo said. “I think it’s going to be overwhelmingly successful, especially with Pete, his wife Maree and Tom, their partner. The Voss boys (Pro 632 racers Dillon and Cory Voss from Florida) and some of my other friends down south highly recommended them, gave them high marks.

“Now we’re trying to get things moving as far as setting up the barriers and such. Pete’s got the timing equipment, he’s got everything he needs. I’m helping him with the construction part of it, setting up the barriers. 

“It’s an ideal location. It’s 3,200 acres with runways of 7,000 feet and 10,000 feet. It’s got a sewage plant, it’s got electric, it’s got water. It’s on the railroad so if there was a motorsports park here, people could come out from Manhattan by railroad.”

The airpark, where aviation giant Northrop Grumman once assembled military aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat, has for decades been viewed as a potential target for racing. Donald Trump and Bill France Jr., for instance, once sought the property as the site to build a NASCAR speedway. Only now, with Scalzo’s expertise in similar situations as an asset, has a group been successful.

“Pete was told for years, ‘It’s a noise issue.’ I remember five years back he wanted to come do a noise test and just never got the permission,” Montecalvo said. “This time, the timing was right: for me to meet with the supervisor; to have a supervisor who understands the need for it and the value of it; and a town board that supports her in her thoughts that they also know the value. 

“Pete’s the key guy here because he’s done this before and he’s got the experience. He was able to get NHRA sanctioning, which was a big deal because there are many, many NHRA members here on Long Island. The other thing is that it brings validity to it that it’s going to be done the right way as far as safety goes.”

And as far as Montecalvo is concerned, the resumption of racing is going to fill a very large void on car-crazy Long Island.

“You look at the money that’s out here in the Hamptons and the car collections … you have no idea what’s out here. This is car country here,” he said. “In an ideal situation, somebody would come in and build a road course and a dragstrip to replace the Bridgehampton road course and the three dragstrips that we had.

“The ‘Long Island Needs a Dragstrip’ guys, they did a good job of getting the visibility out here and awareness that we need a track. You could go to their car show on a Tuesday night and there’s 700 cars. And that’s just one car show. There’s car shows every night of the week that have three, four, five, six, seven hundred cars. There are a lot of car buffs.

“The car collections on the east end are incredible. There’s one guy not too far from my office that’s got 30 Hemi cars. Can you imagine? Any day of the week, you go down Main Street in Southampton, there’s nothing but Ferraris and Lamborghinis. To me, it would be an ideal location for a motorsports park where you could have paddocks for these people to keep their cars; it would bring in jobs; you would have high-tech mechanics; chassis shops; restoration shops. All we need is Bruton Smith to come here and visit it.”

In addition to multiple NASCAR tracks, Smith’s Speedway Motorsports owns and operates the dragstrips that host NHRA-sanctioned national events in Charlotte, Bristol, Sonoma and Las Vegas. Adding another facility to the ranks would require -- as Montecalvo and thousands of others who support racing on Long Island have discovered through the years -- political allies. It’s also necessary to have someone like Scalzo who’s willing to be flexible with opponents of such a plan.

“Pete’s made some adjustments. There was a situation with some local environmentalists who were worried about the birds nesting during a certain period of time this summer, so Pete adjusted his schedule around that. He’s gone above and beyond every concession they’ve asked for,” Montecalvo said.

“We’re anxious to get this thing going. We know what the need is here.”

Montecalvo said Scalzo “is spending a bundle on this thing” to make racing happen on Long Island. Montecalvo’s not ruling out racing there himself, but obviously only in one of his street cars and not his PDRA Extreme Pro Stock entry that covers the eighth in the 4.0-second, high 180-mph range.

“John Pluchino has a Buick he’s putting together. We’ll all find something to play with. Maybe we could race each other like we did back in the day; history repeating itself. John had his Monza, I had my Camaro, and we used to go at it every weekend -- me, him, (John) Nobile and everybody else at Westhampton.”

But there’s someone Montecalvo wants to see in action perhaps more than anyone else.

Town supervisor Yvette Aguiar, he said, “can’t wait to get out there and race. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Everybody’s excited about it.”