American Race Track Posters

Most of them were something else first

Watkins Glen began on the streets: in 1948, the first road race held in America after the Second World War ran through the village and over the railroad tracks, before moving to a permanent circuit on a wooded hilltop in 1956. Sebring still races on the concrete of a wartime airfield where bomber crews trained. Laguna Seca was built in 1957 on army land, after the road races among the pines and cypresses of Pebble Beach were abandoned as too dangerous. Most of the rest began more humbly: Lime Rock Park was a farm of sweet corn and potatoes, Road Atlanta a farmer’s field, Mid-Ohio pasture, Virginia International Raceway a farm in a bend of the Dan River that had once been a plantation, Sonoma a hillside where dairy cows grazed, and Circuit of the Americas ground set aside for a housing subdivision that was never built.

Road courses in the land of the oval

America is famous for its ovals, and one even finds its way into this collection: at Daytona, the road course twists through the infield of a speedway banked at 31 degrees, about as steep as a staircase. But these eleven belong to the other American tradition, the road course: turns to the left and to the right and, on many of them, blind crests and long drops laid into the land. Most of them opened in the 1950s and 1960s, as racing left the streets for circuits built for it; the newest, Circuit of the Americas, opened in 2012.

One map of American road racing

Drawn in the same engineering language, they hang together as a single map, each with the corner its fans talk about: the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, the Boot at Watkins Glen, the Keyhole at Mid-Ohio, Oak Tree at Virginia International Raceway, Sunset Bend at Sebring. Start with the one you know best, the track you drive to every summer or the one you have lapped a thousand times in a simulator, and let the wall grow one road course at a time.

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