TAMPA, Fla. — A former dairy farm next to the Tampa Executive Airport is now a car enthusiast’s dream — one that features a performance track designed by Formula One track designer Hermann Tilke, car condos and a corporate events center.

Called The Motor Enclave, the facility is expected to fully open in a few months. 

“It’s kind of like a playground for auto enthusiasts and we’re going to open fully sold out,” said The Motor Enclave CEO and founder Brad Oleshansky. “Our events center will open in October. We’re already booking a crazy amount of events.”

Oleshansky said his 1.6-mile track has a projected top performance speed of 168 miles per hour.

“We don’t do races here and there’s no competition,” he said. “It is a full-blown racetrack, but we call it a performance circuit or a performance course.”

The motor track recently opened for members like Matt Chancey, who said he bought a BMW M5 Competition to drive on the track.

“Keep it here at the garage and I just drive it on the track,” he said. “It’s never been on the street.”

Chancey said he joined because he needed a hobby to take his mind off his stressful job as a private equity venture capitalist and the track is only about a 15 minute drive from his Channelside home.

“I’m really immersed in what I do — love it, but it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of stress,” he said. “So, to have something that I can disengage. Just laying by the pool doesn’t get it for me, it doesn’t turn my brain off.”

The Motor Enclave offers members the option to purchase a garage, or “car condo,” which comes empty and the owner pays for the custom build out. The car condos range in price from $300,000 to $3.8 million and out of 300, Oleshansky says there’s only five left for sale.

Chancey said he bought a mid-sized garage and has been thinking about going with a "Talladega Nights" movie theme.

“It’ll hold four cars on the floor … and there’ll be a loft built on the second floor," he said. "So, up there, there’ll be kind of like a bar area— this will kind of be the home away from home, or the man cave.”  

Oleshansky is a corporate attorney who opened a similar community, M1 Concourse, in Michigan, before leaving in 2019 to launch The Motor Enclave. The developer said he had never been to Tampa and a computer model picked the location for his newest venture.

“I chose Tampa based on data — I had never been to Tampa in my life,” he said. “This is five years ago, (the data) said Tampa is the perfect place for this.”

Last year, Oleshansky said he decided to move his corporate headquarters to Tampa and brought the original Big Boy statue from the first restaurant for his off-road experience.

“That restaurant was torn down 10 years ago and I knew the guy who had it in his warehouse,” said Oleshansky. “He finally called me and goes, ‘I have to get rid of this thing,’ and I said, ‘Let’s bring that to Tampa.’”

The car-centric community has 100 acres of off-road experience, a 2-acre skid pad and a 37,000-square-foot corporate events center with a second-floor balcony overlooking the track.

“We really expect this to be the place for any event in Tampa Bay," said Oleshansky. "We can seat 1,200 when most facilities in town are capped at 700. We actually designed this as a standalone beautiful facility, forget the track, forget all the driving elements, to accommodate weddings because there’s a big marketplace for weddings in Tampa.”

Oleshansky said there’s a $50,000 one-time membership fee to join with a $6,000 annual fee, but maintains that The Motor Enclave is going to be more than just a place for the rich.

“While it’s rooted in a membership-based club, we will do tons of public activations of driving programs where you can pay to come and drive either one of our vehicles or your own vehicle,” he said. “The most important thing is that it’s not just for these garage owners. It’s for the corporate clients that come for an event, it’s for the general public that comes for a car show.”

Oleshansky said he has spent $150 million in private funds to build The Motor Enclave, which included 27,000 trucks of dirt to raise the 200-acre site by four feet for drainage. He said it’s a huge economic development project for Hillsborough County.

“We’re actually an economically development approved project," he said. "The economic impact, I mean, we’re talking about thousands of construction jobs, millions of increased tax revenue for the county. Bringing regional and national traffic to town, hotel rooms, all that stuff. The impact is hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The official grand opening for The Motor Enclave is expected to take place in October.