Many of our previous Flashback Friday ‘ghost track’ tours have taken us to facilities that operated in the prime of drag racing’s golden age and met an early demise; now  buried under decades of weeds and grown-up trees or simply a distant memory under a middle class subdivision.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Among the more recent dragstrip closures, however, was the Miami-Hollywood Motorsports Park, which was built in 1966 in Pembroke Pines, Florida in southern Broward County, less than 30 miles from Miami. During it’s nearly three-decade tenure, the full quarter-mile track located at the corner of 172nd Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard (now Pines Boulevard) operated under various but similar names, including Miami Speedway, Miami Dragway, Miami-Hollywood Speedway, and others.

Miami-Hollywood in February 1990

In it’s heyday, Miami-Hollywood was a widely recognized racetrack that featured NHRA sanctioning, and in the 1970’s, was described as the go-to place for drag racers and hot rodders in the budding South Florida region. Sadly, the track met it’s fate in 1992 due to expansion from homes to the west. Today, all remnants of the former palace of speed are but a visualization in the mind of those who raced there under the Pembroke Isles subdivision, which now occupies all of the land the track was once sat on.

The subdivision’s wetland buffer site that borders Pines Boulevard was once the resting place of many racers who couldn’t reign their machines in and ran off the end of the dragstrip.

Video Tour of Miami-Hollywood in June 1991