Keith Williams was a motor-racing enthusiast with a developer's eye, and the 3.219-kilometre circuit he carved out at Carrara reflected both passions. He ran a dragstrip straight down the main straight, a feature he would later repeat at his Adelaide International Raceway in 1972, then strung together the fast right under the Dunlop Bridge, a quick left, and a series of rights and lefts skirting Repco Hill before a slow right fed the cars back onto the straight. Within the loop of track he tucked an airstrip and a quarter-mile dirt speedway. The complex sat opposite the old Surfers Paradise Ski Gardens, a slice of motorsport dropped into the swampy flats just inland from the beach.

Drag racing fired up at Easter in 1966, and two years later the circuit launched the event that would define it. The Winternationals, first run in June 1968, grew into the largest drag-racing meeting anywhere outside the United States, drawing crowds and machinery from across the country to the Gold Coast every winter. The roar of the strip became part of the region's calendar. When the circuit eventually closed, the Winternationals did not die with it; the meeting moved to Willowbank Raceway near Ipswich in 1988, where it continues to this day, a living thread back to those first runs at Carrara.

The road circuit drew the international sets too. The Tasman Series arrived in 1968, and that year Jim Clark in his Lotus-Ford and Chris Amon in a Ferrari filled the top two places, with Clark's teammate Graham Hill third, names that read like a roll-call of the era's giants. Formula 5000 cars ran here through the early 1970s, and when the Tasman Series faded the Rothmans International Series stepped in to fill the gap. The Australian Touring Car Championship visited again and again across the 1970s and into the 1980s, and the circuit staged gruelling endurance contests, the Rothmans 12 Hour races among them. The Australian Grand Prix came just once, in 1975, and the weather made it memorable: Max Stewart splashed his Lola T400 to victory through torrential rain. A decade later, in 1986, John Bowe set the outright lap record of one minute and 4.3 seconds in the Chevrolet-powered Veskanda sports car, a mark that would stand as the circuit's fastest forever.

Williams sold up in 1984, and the circuit closed at the end of 1987 after twenty-one years, the final meeting held on 27 August. The track was left to decay. In 1993 there came a curious afterlife: volunteers and Queensland police patched the old dragstrip back into service for "Operation: Drag," a Blue Light scheme offering young drivers a ten-dollar run against a mate on a sealed strip rather than racing on public roads. It was a brief revival. The asphalt was finally torn up in 2003, and the site reborn as the Emerald Lakes canal estate. Today, manicured lawns and quiet water cover ground that once trembled to V8s flat out under the Dunlop Bridge.