Thunderbolt raceway (former Fleming Island NOLF) per NHRA: Mike McInnis, who saw his first drag race in (he thinks) 1965, recalled his most memorable ghost track. I got interested in cars and started reading every car magazine I could get my hands on about 1962. (I was 11), he wrote. I started reading about drag racing and started bugging my dad to take me to a race. We were on the south side of Jacksonville, Fla., late one Sunday afternoon, and I started seeing numbers of cars (mostly flat towed) coming back from a day at the drags at nearby Thunderbolt Dragway. Needless to say, my efforts to get to a race intensified. We lived about 100 miles from that track (in O’Brien, Fla.), but that seemed like a small obstacle to a young kid dying to see some action at the drags. I heard an advertisement on the Jacksonville radio station WAPE, the big Ape, 690 on the AM dial, stating that Eddie Schartman and the Air Lift Rattler would be match racing with Shirl Greer in the Tension Dodge at the Thunderbolt Dragway, under the lights on Saturday night. Never has a more intense bit of lobbying taken place than that which was done as I promised my dad anything just to get him to take me. Well, he finally broke down (as dads often do; I have four sons of my own) and took me and a buddy over there. Thunderbolt Dragway was just a part of an old abandoned military airfield complex south of Jacksonville on the way to Green Cove Springs. There were no guardrails as I recall, and the main lighting other than a few bare lightbulbs strung between poles in the pits was an old Army surplus searchlight mounted on a trailer and directed down the track behind the starting line. I was in drag race paradise. Along with quite a large crowd, we were standing right at the edge of the designated dragstrip within probably 20 or 30 feet of the cars as they staged and blasted off into nitro nirvana. I have never been the same. The details of other things that happened that night are fuzzy, but I do remember being there. If memory serves me correctly, I think Greer beat Schartman two out of three. About a month later, we went back (I think my dad even liked it, though he never let on) to the same track and saw Arnie Beswick take on Shirl Greer. I have often wondered what ever became of Thunderbolt Dragway and when it ceased to operate. I am not sure of the exact location of it, but I believe it was on U.S. 17. Like Fremont, Thunderbolt Dragway was on a Naval Outlying Landing Field, in this case the abandoned Fleming Island NOLF. According to the Web site Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields, the track got its name from a large number of P-47 Thunderbolt war planes that were housed there. Fleming Island was on the west side of Route 17, along the west shore of the St. Johns River, approximately 10 miles South of Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Drag racing historian Bret Kepner says that the dragstrip was run on the topmost of the facilitys four runways (again, brilliantly highlighted here) and that no presence of the airfield can be found today as it has been covered by – what else? – housing.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 16:57:53 +0000