Sunset Dragway (Panama City Beach)

This quarter-mile strip was on Thomas Drive next to the Navy Mine Defense Laboratory. Sol Stewart and Bill Glandt owned it, and it was running by 1960 at the latest. On July 3, 1960, Ed Garlits, Don Garlits’s brother, beat the track’s reigning top eliminator Jim Burnett, and on November 20 Jack Patrick of Tallahassee won top eliminator in his “Bad News” dragster. Apart from an occasional gas class show, the track stuck to super stock, and the Ford versus Chevy battles drew the crowds. Dave Raulerson was the manager. On February 12, 1961, Kenneth Allen lost control of his car and hit 57-year-old spectator Huey Lee Brannon, who died.

In June 1962 racing moved from Sundays to Saturday nights. The usual pattern was the first and third Sundays in winter and every Saturday night in the hot months, sometimes followed by twist contests. The track reflected the Deep South’s prejudices of the time: on September 9, 1962, it held a segregated race advertised as “colored only.” On May 18, 1963, Herman Moore of Enterprise, Alabama, set the super stock record at 11.79 seconds.

The track was renamed Miracle Strip Speedway in 1968. Billy Jacobs and Jesse Childree bought it in 1969, brought back the Sunset Dragway name and booked a busy schedule of exhibition and feature cars, including top fuelers such as Clayton Harris and plenty of wheelstanders. Little is known after 1971. A Panama City News Herald article from January 25, 1972, hints that the strip closed in 1971, possibly over safety. It reported that drag racing was being revived with help from the highway patrol and county law enforcement, and that an NHRA-sanctioned strip would be built on U.S. 231 near Highway 20. Whether that strip was ever built is unknown.