Virginia International Raceway Track Map Poster

Most of the corners at Virginia International Raceway were never meticulously planned: when it was built, on a plantation in a long bend of the Dan River, if a rock or a tree stood in the way, the crew simply paved around it. The result runs 5.262 km (3.27 miles) clockwise through seventeen turns, with 40 meters (130 ft) of elevation change, less than a mile from the North Carolina line.

It opened in August 1957, and the winner of the opening weekend’s main race summed it up: one lap here was like a hundred at Watkins Glen. In 1974 it closed, and for a quarter of a century it went back to farmland, its crumbling asphalt left among the weeds like a ghost of its past glories. In 2000 it came back to life on its original centerline, and today it runs like a country club, with a tavern in the old plantation house, finished in 1876.

From the inside, it is a chain of blind, linked corners. The Climbing Esses go uphill and crest at their apexes, taken at a tremendous entry speed, and on the Roller Coaster the ground drops away beneath the car. Oak Tree, Turn 12, took its name from an oak more than 200 years old that shaded the apex and watched the track from the highest point of the property. It fell in the summer of 2013; two years later, a tree grown from one of its acorns was planted nearby, and the corner kept its name.

On the poster, the whole chain is drawn out: seventeen numbered turns plus 5a, 6a, 14a and 17a, with the Horse Shoe, the Snake, the Climbing Esses, South Bend, Oak Tree, the Roller Coaster and Hog Pen lettered in, and the inner layouts traced in muted lines. Heritage, the clubhouse edition, suits a circuit that is, quite literally, a club. The oak is gone, but on this map it still has its corner.