Road America Track Map Poster

Before Road America, the race ran through the middle of town. In 1951 and 1952, sports cars tore through the resort village of Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, with little more than snow fence and straw bales to protect crowds in the tens of thousands, in a village of about 600 people. When racing on public roads came to an end, the locals built a road of their own: 6.515 km (4.05 miles) and fourteen turns, run clockwise through hills the glaciers left behind.

It was laid out by a local highway engineer. He walked its hills and valleys for months and drew a four-mile lap that copied his favorite turns from the nearby country roads. The first race was scheduled for September 1955 before a shovel had turned. The track was finished just in time for the first practice, and the main race of that first weekend was won by a nose. More than seventy years on, the lap the cars race is still the one he drew.

Two of its stretches take their names from that landscape, Moraine Sweep and Kettle Bottoms: a moraine is a ridge of rock and earth left behind by a glacier, a kettle the hollow left where buried ice melted. From the start/finish line to the run between The Kink and Canada Corner, the track falls 49 meters (160 ft), the height of a fifteen-story building. The Kink is the legend: a fast sweeper taken by the quickest cars at about 275 km/h (170 mph), a soccer field in under a second and a half, with almost no runoff. Fans roam its 260 hectares (640 acres) with no assigned seats, camping by the track and grilling bratwurst.

The poster numbers all fourteen turns and letters in eight names, from Road America Straight to Thunder Valley. Beside The Kink, one muted loop marks the chicane added for motorcycles in 2003, the only addition to the layout in its history; the cars still take The Kink. Blueprint, the drafting-room edition, suits a circuit drawn by a road engineer. Most plans get redrawn. For the cars, this one never was.