Sonoma Raceway Track Map Poster

Sonoma Raceway was dreamed up on a hunting trip, on a hillside where dairy cows grazed above the mudflats of San Pablo Bay. Still known to many as Sears Point, after a pioneer who settled south of Sonoma in 1851, it runs 4.056 km (2.52 miles) clockwise through twelve turns, and the lap falls 49 meters (160 ft) from its highest corner to its lowest.

It held its first race in December 1968, and the land had its say: the last hairpin had to be changed from the plans because the ground there was an old dairy farm, complete with a manure pond. Within two years the track had closed, and a reporter found only rabbits and the occasional deer on the asphalt. It came back, and today its 1,600 acres of grassland are kept short by thousands of sheep; the wine country next door is called Carneros, Spanish for rams, after the flocks that once covered these hills.

The lap peaks at Turn 3a, a blind corner 53 meters (174 ft) above sea level, then pours downhill through the Carousel, a sweep of more than 200 degrees, and the snaking Esses to Turn 10, the fastest corner on the circuit and the lowest, just 4 meters (14 ft) above the sea. After that comes Calamity Corner, the Turn 11 hairpin and the last chance to pass before the line.

The poster numbers every turn, 3a and 8a included, letters in the Carousel, the Esses and Calamity Corner, and traces in a muted line the Chute, the shortcut built in 1998 because no permanent grandstand could go up at the Carousel. Rosso’s burgundy belongs to the vineyards around it. It began with dairy cows and today belongs to the sheep; in between, more than half a century of racing, drawn here in one line.