Mount Panorama Track Map Poster

For most of the year, Mount Panorama is a public road: anyone can drive it, in both directions, at 60 km/h (37 mph), and some homes can only be reached from the circuit. On race weekends it closes and becomes a racetrack again: 6.213 km (3.86 miles) and twenty-three turns, run counterclockwise over the mountain at Bathurst, with 174 meters (571 ft) of elevation change, more than the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge stands above the water.

Settlers called it Bald Hills until 1934, when a competition renamed it Mount Panorama; since 2015 its official name has also carried the Wiradjuri one, Wahluu. In the Depression, relief money would not pay for a racetrack, but it would pay for a scenic drive, so a scenic drive was built, every corner a little wider than on the plans. It opened in 1938, and the first races ran on dirt, with canvas tents for pits, before some 20,000 paying spectators.

Then there is the mountain. After the climb of Mountain Straight, The Cutting, carved into the hillside, rises one meter for every six around a blind corner where a spin is very hard to recover from. Over the top, from Skyline, the road plunges through The Esses and The Dipper without once running straight until Forrest's Elbow; then Conrod Straight lets the fastest touring cars run at close to 300 km/h (186 mph). It was the Main Straight until a car broke a connecting rod there in 1939, so spectacularly that the straight was later renamed in its honor.

The poster numbers all twenty-three turns and letters in seventeen names, from Hell Corner to Murray's Corner, with the pit lane in a muted line. Heritage, the racing-green edition, suits a 1938 scenic drive where several corners are named after its parks, its quarry and its rock cutting. Most of the year it is a road with a speed limit; on paper, it is always what fans call it: the Mountain.