Santa Rosa/Cotati Drag Strip

The city of Santa Rosa sponsored this strip, 7.6 miles south of the city on a runway of the Cotati Naval Outer Landing Field just west of U.S. Highway 101. The strip ran northwest and was 250 feet wide and 4,800 feet long, with a big pit area on the other runway to the west. The Redwood Empire Timing Association, made up of 38 area car clubs, ran the first race on October 7, 1956. Two months later, on December 16, 1956, Joseph Mahoney was killed in a racing crash, and for a while it wasn’t clear racing would go on, but it did. Jim McLennan drove the Gotelli-Champion dragster to top eliminator at 168.28 mph on February 21, 1960, and set a strip record of 176.42 mph and 8.62 seconds on July 17, 1960. By 1964 it was known as Cotati Raceway, and one of its last events, possibly the last, was the NHRA Fall Championship Drag Race on November 14, 1964. By the mid-1970s parts of the old strip were being developed, first as a large mobile home park and then as a big retail center, and by 1993 every trace of the airfield and strip was gone. One online source overlays the old landing field on today’s landscape.