Imola Track Map Poster

Imola was drawn on foot. As the story goes, one summer night in 1947, a group of friends walking along a lane to the town’s mineral springs traced a small circuit on the roads around them, and the idea grew from there. Today its 4.909 km (3.05 miles) and nineteen turns run counterclockwise over the hills beside the Santerno river, wrapped entirely around a park of sulphur springs.

A cooperative was founded to build it, the first stone was laid in 1950 and it opened in April 1953 in front of 60,000 people from all over Italy. It was stitched together from existing country roads and new stretches, and for years those roads stayed open to everyday traffic between races. Locals still call it the circuit of the Santerno, and its corners are named after the land: Tamburello after a field where a ball game of that name was played, Tosa after a farm, Rivazza after the right bank of the river.

It is one of the few major circuits raced counterclockwise, and it never sits still: the road drops at up to 9.1 percent from Piratella into the hollow of Acque Minerali and climbs straight back out at 9.4 percent to the Variante Alta, where the cars brake hard at the top of the hill before the plunge to Rivazza. In 1952, before it had even opened, it was hailed as the little Nürburgring of Italy.

The poster numbers all nineteen turns and letters in Tamburello, Villeneuve, Tosa, Piratella, Acque Minerali, the Variante Alta and Rivazza. Heritage, the vintage clubhouse edition, suits a circuit that friends sketched on a walk and a cooperative built. In the local dialect, the engine is é mutòr, and you can hear all their passion in the way they say it.