Road America: Why America has the best circuits in the world

Motorsport outposts dot this place like chicken pox. Most are what we call short tracks – grassroots ovals less than a mile in length, often only a third of a mile around. Some 900 such bullrings are scattered across the country, more than 700 of them surfaced in dirt. (Racing directory GetIntheStands.com lists 21 short tracks in my home state of Tennessee alone.) Along with the nation’s more than 400 sanctioned dragstrips, short tracks host the bulk of our four-wheeled motorsport, and they are pure and wonderful and as mom-and-pop genuine as it gets. You sit in those stands with a beer and a hot dog on a summer night, you meet a small-town America so undiluted and real it almost hurts.

But if I’m honest, I don’t know enough about that stuff. I love ovals, but as a kid it was through road courses that I found racing. And they are, sadly, less common. Wikipedia claims the US holds just 75 such circuits.

The suffering! The agony!

That was sarcasm, for the record.

Seventy-five circuits! Even in a land this vast, how is that anything but a gift? Those ribbons of asphalt run the gamut from hoary old club haunts unchanged since the 1960s to FIA Grade 1 facilities that have held F1, IndyCar, and MotoGP fixtures. I figure maybe half of US road courses are large and fast enough to really stretch the legs of a modern supercar. But in a culture so obviously besotted with turning left, how did all those right-hand corners come to be?

As with so much in racing, change followed death. It just took a while. Automobile racing began here as it did in Europe – among the wealthy, near the turn of the last century, on public roads and for small audiences. And then, in 1909, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened, democratising everything. Like the UK’s Brooklands circuit, built just two years earlier, Indy’s facility was a spectacle in itself, a wildly expensive and fast closed-course stadium in a country still mostly unpaved and slow-moving.

Indy’s model met the needs of the moment. In an age when cars were still uncommon and often viewed with suspicion, people undoubtedly found ovals familiar; horses had long been raced in similar layouts. Next to open-road racing, ovals were easier to spectate at, faster, and safer. At a time when automotive engineering was about as fragile as a wet Kleenex, the sustained loads of an oval lap served as an incomparable durability lab. Factor in a population drawn toward engine displacement for practical reasons – America is big; power shrinks distance – and the proliferation begins to make sense. And so in the years before World War II, American racing blossomed mostly on converted horse courses or hastily built wooden ‘board’ tracks of epic scale. (Banked speedways built of two-by-fours and up to two miles long, deadly as hell. A fascinating Google dive, by the way.)

Not that there weren’t exceptions. In 1948, a small group of East Coast sports car enthusiasts mustered enough civic support to hold a sanctioned, European-style road race in the tiny New York village of Watkins Glen. Their efforts changed everything.

The Glen event was a landmark, our first postwar road race. It drew a small but encouraging crowd and a grid of mostly foreign iron, American cars generally handling and braking like cows at that time. More important, like Indy, the Glen race met the moment, a public flush with postwar optimism and prosperity. A small sanctioning body, the Sports Car Club of America, was quickly formed; as drivers and cars evolved and grew faster, spending and crowds bloomed.

The Glen race mirrored contemporary European practice: cars ran flat-out down narrow country roads and village streets. Spectators were protected by hay bales. Similar events quickly appeared around the country. When cars inevitably lost control and scythed through crowds, spectators died. When public outcry escalated, the races were moved to more remote roads, then to the runways of friendly airports.

In the small Wisconsin vacation town of Elkhart Lake, a local businessman had watched as road racing came to town, transformed the area, and was subsequently banned by state government. He spearheaded an effort to fund a permanent racing facility mirroring the vibe of local highways. The roads around Elkhart were shotgunned over long and tumbling hills and joined by fast, needle-thread corners; when the town’s four-mile circuit opened in 1955, it was draped across 260 hectares of land and was basically a clone of the ballsy two-lanes outside the gate. Those 14 corners encompassed, among other things, more than 150 feet of elevation change, one plunging ravine, and three tree-lined straights so removed from each other that they often held different weather. (Happy personal memory: sun on the first straight, rain on the second, snow on the third.)

Road America wasn’t America’s first permanent road course – that was Willow Springs Raceway, which opened in the desert near Los Angeles in 1953. But Elkhart was a watermark. The next decade or so would see dozens of other ambitious and demanding circuits rise around the country, often in locations where public-road racing had flourished: bucolic spots like Watkins Glen (1956); Monterey, California (Laguna Seca, 1957); and southern Virginia (Virginia International Raceway, 1957).

Both Willow and Road America are still in use today, layouts virtually unchanged. Each is a hoot to drive, but their differences are staggering. Stroll through the rusty old gates at Willow, you can watch afternoon wind throw blinding sand through the fourth-gear, decreasing-radius Turn 9, same as 70 years ago. Willow is an amateur-only time warp that hasn’t hosted pro racing in ages; the grounds are so unchanged, they appeared in the period film Le Mans ’66 with little more than a fresh coat of paint. Road America, by contrast, changed with the times. It is now world-class and polished, FIA Grade 2. You can park yourself under a tree and watch carbon prototypes or IndyCars clock a buck-eighty into braking for Turn 1, all while visiting European drivers chatter on the PA, as they have for generations, about what they see as the country’s only ‘proper’ circuit – old-world, big-league, and potent.

This stuff hits me square in the emotional plexus. I love how Willow and Road America are steeped in history but force you to live in the present, how I’ve never clicked off a fast lap at either without the feeling of risking something. Like all great circuits – like the best parts of America – they somehow manage to exist fully in the now while keeping the past warm on a front burner.

Seventy-five circuits. I’ve been lucky enough to drive or race on half of them. Of those, maybe half are truly special, demanding and spicy. And a few are genuine marvels. A personal top four:

Watkins Glen: New York State, 3.3 miles. In the bluffs above the village. Hosted Formula 1 for years but has been reconfigured since. Blissfully fast in spots. Has multiple wall-framed corners where good entry speed feels like being shot from a gun in reverse.

Laguna Seca: Northern California, 2.2 miles. In a zillion video games, widely believed overrated. It probably is, but I love it anyway. A dreamy little snow globe of a circuit nestled in a mountaintop dry lakebed that overlooks the ocean. One of those places that somehow manages to be utterly boring to lap by yourself and a magical, perfectly judged canvas when you’re fighting for position. With the azure Pacific twinkling below.

Virginia International Raceway: Virginia, 3.2 miles. Another midcentury relic with modern safety updates. A friend once described it as Road America ‘melted, stretched, and more sadistic.’ Carroll Shelby famously called a single lap at VIR like a hundred at Watkins Glen. Shelby was a marketing genius, so when I first heard that line, I thought it was hype. Then I met the place and shut up.

Lime Rock Park: Connecticut, 1957, 1.5 miles. Tucked into a bowl valley in the park-like Berkshire highlands, just two hours from Manhattan. The landscape is Laguna in reverse, as verdant as Seca is dry, Monaco folded into a country garden. The third-gear ‘Uphill’ Turn 4 regularly puts air under the front wheels. Chris Dyson raced Porsche LMP2 Spyders at Lime Rock and called it ‘squeezing two pounds of salami into a one-pound bag… you never get a rest.’

You meet a lot of circuit PR people in my line of work. They generally mean well, but lord, so few of them get it. So many will whip up some press release boasting how some 95-turn private-club circuit they represent is ‘one of the longest in the world.’ As if scale and speed and joy and the perfect place for a 100mph chess match were the same thing.

Stereotype paints the appeal of living in the US as access to excess. I see it more as a chance to make the most of what you’ve got. Road America is big, sure, and Lime Rock is small, but their joy is divorced from size. Are these old lions better or worse than the giants of Europe – Spa, the ’Ring, and so on? Nah. What does that word even mean, anyway, when the whole point of such joints is to forget real life for a bit?

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t mean squat. You go and you bury yourself in the moment and turn off the world for a while, and if you’re lucky, the spot is unique, and there’s nowhere you’d rather be. Except, of course, the hundreds of other unique places exactly like it.