Snetterton Track Map Poster

When Snetterton’s landowner agreed to let cars race on his old airfield, he set a condition: as a churchwarden, he wanted no racing on Sundays between 10:45 and noon, and everything stopped before evensong. The circuit that grew from that bargain runs 4.778 km (2.97 miles) clockwise through twelve turns on the Norfolk heath where bombers once flew.

The airfield was built in 1942 and from 1943 was home to an American heavy bomber group, whose crews flew food to the Dutch at the end of the war. It closed in 1948, and in 1951 enthusiasts marked out a course on its perimeter roads and one of its runways with sand-filled oil drums, topped, rather eccentrically, with Christmas trees. The first meeting was billed as speed trials, but its one-lap sprints were races in all but name.

Its first great straight, the Norwich Straight, ran for almost a mile beside the main road to Norwich until 1980; it later hosted a Sunday market, and a fast-food restaurant now stands roughly where its hairpin was. That same year, Snetterton held Britain’s first 24-hour race, through the night on a wartime airfield. Today its longest layout, built in 2011, is the second-longest permanent racing circuit in the country, with a hairpin modeled on the one in Montreal.

The poster numbers all twelve turns, every one of them named, from Riches to Bomb Hole, Coram and Murrays, along with its two straights, and traces the links for the shorter layouts in muted lines. Midnight, the black edition, suits a track that has raced through the night. Somewhere under all that speed there is still an airfield, and a churchwarden checking his watch.