Seminole Dragway (Tallahassee)

Seminole Dragway ran on the east-west runway of Dale Mabry Field, which was Tallahassee’s municipal airport from 1928 until it closed in 1961. Most sources say the strip opened in the mid-1960s, but good records point to 1962. Jack Patrick and Henry Trammell rented the airport from the city for $100 in weeks with a race and $25 in weeks without one.

The first race, on April 15, 1962, drew 3,000 people. Louis Carden won top eliminator in his A dragster and took home $150, though he pulled his chute late and went through the barricade at the end of the shutdown area. Rick Bell, who raced there early on, said Patrick was a local speed shop owner who drove an AA/D dragster. Bell remembered a dragster whose chute didn’t open properly running off the end, jumping the road and hitting a chain link fence. He also recalled a weekend when racing was called off for morning rain, the afternoon turned sunny, and everybody showed up anyway. He raced the family car at 16, in 10th grade, and the strip was still open when he left Tallahassee in June 1963. On Sunday, May 20, 1962, Joe Beal’s ‘62 Chevy won both Super Stock and Stock eliminator.

The strip is said to have closed in the early 1970s and then reopened briefly at least twice. It was running around 1976, and Marvin Johnson owned it in 1978. In 1979 his cousin Eddie Johnson leased it and planned weekly bracket racing with a guaranteed $500 purse split among three classes, but a lease dispute between the two killed the season before it started. It may have run a little after that, but by the early 1980s at the latest it closed and stayed closed until 1997, when Chuck Tamaski planned to open it that October under NHRA sanction with Friday and Saturday night racing.

A 2011 newspaper article claimed the track shut down in 1967 after a spectator, J. D. Shores, was killed. His obituary in the Panama City News of August 7, 1967, places his death at Tallahassee Speedway, an oval track. In 2002 Charles Wimberly, owner of Triangle Engineering, proposed repaving and reopening Seminole Raceway. Many residents objected at a Leon County Commission hearing, the plan sat in red tape for about a year, and the strip was never revived.