Steve McQueen downshifted into a hairpin that, twelve years earlier, had been a taxiway where Navy pilots practiced touch-and-go landings. The year was 1962, and the old Naval Outlying Landing Field at Cotati had reinvented itself in the most unlikely way imaginable. Where wartime mechanics once calibrated machine guns and topped off fuel tanks, sports cars now screamed through turns laid out on the same asphalt the federal government had poured to win a war. Cotati's airfield lived two distinct lives in the span of three decades, and both of them were loud.
In 1941, the federal government purchased 142 acres of Sonoma County farmland to build a satellite airfield supporting Naval Air Station Alameda, some sixty miles to the south across the San Francisco Bay. Construction crews laid down a 4,000-foot asphalt runway oriented northeast-southwest, crossed at its midpoint by a second runway stretching 3,800 feet on a southeast-northwest heading. Each runway had its own parallel taxiway, with a third taxiway connecting the eastern ends to a concrete apron. The layout was efficient and functional, a small but purposeful piece of the Navy's sprawling West Coast training infrastructure. By June 1943, an additional 75 acres allowed for a proper operations building crowned by a two-story control tower, a fire and crash truck garage, gasoline storage tanks, an oil storage building, and even a small arms ammunition magazine with a practice backstop for machinegun collimation.
Cotati's airfield had a problem that no amount of engineering could fully solve: water. The site's poor drainage caused periodic flooding that muddied runways and grounded operations. The Navy invested more heavily in nearby NALF Santa Rosa, where the terrain cooperated. Cotati settled into a supporting role as a satellite field, its primary duty reduced to touch-and-go landing practice for student pilots cycling through the Santa Rosa Auxiliary Naval Air Station. It was useful work but unglamorous, the kind of repetitive drilling that wins wars without making headlines. When flooding damaged the runways again in 1945, the Navy had already won the war and lost its patience with the site. Military flight operations at Cotati ended, even as Santa Rosa's field continued operating. The government declared the property excess, and the runways sat idle, cracking slowly in the Sonoma County sun.
For more than a decade, the abandoned airfield was just another piece of surplus military real estate. Then, in 1957, someone looked at those two crossing runways and saw not a defunct naval facility but a ready-made racing circuit. The wide taxiways and broad apron became the bones of a road course, and Cotati Raceway was born. Automobile sports car racing took over the former military asphalt from 1957 to 1972, drawing competitors and spectators who had no idea they were watching wheel-to-wheel battles on ground once walked by sailors. The track attracted genuine star power. Stirling Moss, the legendary British driver widely considered the greatest racer never to win the Formula One World Championship, competed there. Jayne Mansfield brought Hollywood glamour to the spectator stands. Steve McQueen, already obsessed with racing before he became the King of Cool, drove the circuit himself. For fifteen years, Cotati's runways echoed with a different kind of engine roar.
After 1972, the racing stopped too. Commercial development crept across the old airfield, and today the runways and buildings that once served two such different purposes are almost entirely obscured. Shopping centers, parking lots, and subdivisions cover the ground where Navy planes touched down and sports cars leaned into turns. The transformation is so complete that most residents of modern Cotati have no idea they are living and working on top of a place where world-famous drivers once raced and wartime pilots once trained. Only the geometry of certain roads and lot lines hints at the runway orientations beneath. The field that flooded out of one life and roared through another now sits quietly under the unremarkable surface of suburban Sonoma County, its two improbable chapters buried but not quite forgotten.
Coordinates: 38.35°N, 122.72°W. The former airfield site sits in the flatlands east of Cotati, between Highway 101 and the Petaluma River corridor. From the air at 2,000-3,000 feet AGL, the commercial development that replaced the runways is visible as a grid pattern distinct from the surrounding agricultural land. Look for the intersection of Old Redwood Highway and East Cotati Avenue as a reference. Nearest airports: KDVO (Gnoss Field, Novato, 15 nm south), KSTS (Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, 10 nm north). Clear weather typical in summer; winter fog and rain common in the Petaluma Gap wind corridor.