Sunshine Drag Strip/Showtime Dragstrip (Clearwater)

This track opened as a quarter-mile strip in 1960 and ran through at least the 1960s. Hot Rod listed Sunshine Speedway as an NHRA-sanctioned track in its January 1970 issue, and the strip hosted the NAAR Winter Championship drag races on February 27-28, 1971. Drag racer Art Malone owned it in the 1980s and 1990s.

When it closed isn’t known. The state of Florida bought the land for a highway ramp but never got the money to build it, and racing stopped for a while. The oval next door suspended racing in 2004, which may be when the drag strip closed too. It was running again as Sunshine Drag Strip by 2007. In 2012 Robert Yoho began running it as Showtime Dragstrip, an eighth-mile track. The office and timing tower were renovated, new bathrooms went in, and new concrete walls were built along the full eighth mile. The old strip seems to have fit a quarter mile because its starting line sat further back than today’s.

Writer Brian Lohnes described the course as built on a dead-end city street, with 41st Street as the shutdown. He wrote that 126th Avenue North, apparently a dirt road, crosses the track at the finish line, with tire tracks visible in satellite images, and that the strip ends at a steel gate about 50 feet short of busy Ulmerton Road. According to him, the gate stays open when fast cars run and someone watches the traffic. His description hasn’t been confirmed in person.