Road Racing
When most people think of motor racing they imagine the modern world of Formula One, with the races held on purpose built circuits designed with safety, spectator comfort, and other 'corporate' functions in mind. The modern day racing circuit is built to an interchangeable template that is duplicated around the world, available to whomever provides the money, with precious little in the way of local colour or flavours, with the exception of the weather. The drivers and the cars have become the stars, with the tracks seemingly relegated to being mere backdrops for the latest twist in the relentless soap opera of the championship battle. The official line on the new world of international expansion to pristine new race circuits will be overwhelmingly positive. In press releases drivers will talk of the 'challenge' of the tracks; teams will talk of the impressive facilities, and those in charge will say how pleased they are with the organisation. But everyone involved knows that in the modern world of wall-to-wall television coverage and the overwhelming need for safety that nothing else is feasible or possible. But in their more candid moments the drivers will, to a man, admit that the most exciting and challenging circuits are the older ones - the ones that have survived from the old days and somehow made it into the modern world without too much change. They will name the Suzuka track in Japan, built in the 1960s as a test track; the fast sweeps of Silverstone, on what was once an airfield; the close confines of Montreal's Ille Notre Dame, with the walls always menacing; the bumps of Interlagos in the heart of Sao Paulo; flat out blasts of historic Monza; and the old road racing track of Spa Francorchamps in the Belgian Ardennes.
When it comes to the fans too, Spa is usually named as the best circuit that features on the Formula one, and other racing calendars. The appeal of the place lies not just in it's layout but in it's heritage; it is one of the last remaining relics of the old way of doing things, when races were held on closed public roads, and when now the now-revered jewels of the motor racing world like Silverstone and Monza were considered the dull and sterile poor relations to 'real' challenges of the year's calendar. The tracks that were created from a few road blocks, straw bales, and temporary grandstands, and wound through towns, forests, and fields. Road racing was part of the fabric of top level motorsport from the earliest days in a way that is hard to fathom these days. The appeal is understandable, races could be organised without too much difficulty as the public roads were already there, and spectators were easy to attract when the racing came to them. Road racing also improved the breed when it came to the engineering of the cars. Car manufacturers and racing teams desired the challenge of racing on the highway to properly put their designs through their paces. And also understandable is why road racing gradually faded away, only remaining in spirit at the highest levels. As cars became faster and faster not only was it much more dangerous than racing on a purpose built track - for drivers and spectators both - but it was harder to marshal, to charge admission, and to cover on television. Then there was the outside pressure of urbanisation and development encroaching on once quiet country roads, and the higher levels of traffic that meant closing the roads would be more disruptive.
Beginnings
Grand Prix racing began on the public roads. The first ever 'Grand Prix' race was held on a circuit of roads to the south east of the French city of Le Mans in 1906. Translated into English the name means 'Grand Prize' and that was what was on offer from the Automobile Club d'France - a winner's prize of 45,000 francs, roughly the equivalent of half a million pounds in today's money. The race superceded the Gordon Bennett races, a series of races funded by the eponymous American millionaire newspaper owner (the same "Gordon Bennett!" whose name is still invoked as an expression of exasperation in the UK). The races ran from 1900 to 1905, the first three events being races between Paris and Lyon, Paris and Bordeaux, Paris and Innsbruck, then the event was held in Ireland, the UK mainland being off limits, road racing being outlawed by the British government. In 1904 the race moved to the mountains north of Frankfurt in Germany, and then back to France and the city of Clermont Ferrand (a name that will recurr much later in the story). The Bennett races put limits on the number of cars each nation could enter, much like the then-recently revived Olympic games. For 1906 the French, frustrated by this rule, that artificially stifled the French dominance of the nascent automobile industry, decided to hold their own race, open to all comers. They laid out a sixty-four mile long course, a course that the fastest drivers and cars of the day could circle in just under an hour, partly because the organiser built special wooden plank road bypasses around the villages on the course to minimize disruption to the residents.
The Grand Prix at Le Mans set the pattern to follow. A large closed off course, instead of city-to-city races, roughly triangular in shape, with specially built grandstands, pit garages, bridges, and advertising hoardings and spectator fences lining the track. The entire length of the course was sealed with a tar surface to minimise flying stones and clouds of lingering dust that came with the standard unsurfaced roads. The race was split into two six lap parts over two days, with the finishing time of the first day determining the starting time on the second. The event was won by a Hungarian called Ferenc Szisz - curiously the only Hungarian to ever win a Grand Prix race to date - driving a Renault. The event had been a success, but without any entrants from British or American cars - the two nations being suspicious of the French motives for creating a race that well suited their own car industry so well. Thus began a detachment between the three groups - mainland Europe, the UK, and America, and their ways of going racing that would persist throughout the century and into the present day
In America, the Vanderbilt family, eager to help the American car industry catch up with Europe, created the Vanderbilt Cup races on Long Island in 1904, with a similar open policy for entrants as the Grand Prix would have. The races were a success, but unfortunately for the USA would be won by French cars for the first three years. In 1908 William Vanderbilt, the main enthusiast for racing in the family, completed work on a paved highway; the Long Island Motor Parkway, a nearly fifty mile toll road, a precursor to the modern motorway, and also a convenient place to host a race. The 1908 Vanderbilt cup was won, much to the joy of the crowds, by a American called George Robertson, driving an American car, the Locomobile. In 1911, the Cup moved to the Southern city of Savannah in Georgia to join together with another race, the Automobile Club of America's "Grand Prize", a race run to the same rules as the Grands Prix that had been held on the same Savannah course in 1908 but then suspended for two years. The two events became a double-header and moved on in the next years to Milwaukee, Santa Monica in Los Angeles, and San Francisco too, before both being abruptly halted by America's joining the Great War in 1917. By then the Vanderbilt Cup and the Grand Prize had already begun to be outshined by an upstart event; the Indianapolis 500 mile race, held on a giant 2.5 mile long rectangular race and test track built in 1909 - the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The Vanderbilt Cup would be briefly revived in the late 1930s, but it only lasted two years. This was the time of German and Italian domination of racing, and their was little local interest to draw in the spectators. The main focus of American racers had been drawn away from the European and international scene and become firmly fixed around the Indianapolis 500 and high speed oval track racing. Indianapolis had been inspired the by the Brooklands track, built south of London. The world's first ever purpose built racetrack, Brooklands came about because of the banning of racing on the public road. Alarmed by the British establishment's heavy handed approach and the potential setbacks it could cause to Britain's ambitions in the automotive industry, Brookland's builder, Hugh Locke-King, had spared no expense and built a huge egg-shaped high speed track, with giant bankings at each end to ensure that the track would be able to accommodate very high speeds. Brooklands would become the home of Britain's racers, and the British would only be bit-part players in the emerging Grand Prix scene. Their major successes would come in overcoming the French dominance in both speed records and endurance races. The high speed Brooklands track would become and ideal base for intrepid speed record breakers like Malcolm Campbell, and for manufacturers like Bentley to test their cars on long-distance runs. In the late 1920s Bentley would come to dominate a different kind of race to the Grands Prix. After the 1906 French Grand Prix, that race returned to the Le Mans area again in 1921, on a different circuit to the immediate south of the city, although a separate race, confusingly called the "Grand Prix de France" had been run in 1911 and 1913. The 1921 race inspired the local automobile club, the Automobile Club de L'ouest, to create their own annual race, based around endurance rather than speed, the Twenty Four Hour race.
Grand Prix
In 1907 another "Grand Prix" was held, but as noted above, it wasn't in Le Mans this time, but further north at Dieppe. The course was shorter, only 48 miles rather than 64, and without any of the wooden bypasses that had been built for the Le Mans race. The same course would be used again in 1908, and again in 1912, after the race was put on hold for two years. In 1913 the race shifted again, fifty miles east to Amiens. The Amiens course was very exciting for it's time; the usual triangle of fairly straight, flat roads, livened up by a narrow and twisty downhill run to a crossroads in a small country town, before a high speed run back up a river valley through challenging high speed bends. This would be the future of the Grand Prix, less a test of pure engine power and bravery, than of the complete package of chassis, engine and driver, and already rules were clamping down on the allowable size of cars and engines. In 1913, though, the Amiens course was clearly almost too much for the times as four drivers and an unlucky bystander had been killed in crashes while testing on the course before the race.
The Grand Prix never returned to the roads south of Amiens, although ironically their exciting twists and turns would soon become the norm. In 1914 France's second city, Lyon, took up the honour of holding the race, and pulled out all the stops, creating a very grand course of twenty miles, first snaking up parallel to a river north of the city, before climbing up into the hills, and then dropping back down through a photogenic double hairpin bend, where many spectators crowded onto the banks to watch, and giving the drivers a panoramic view of the the finish line far below by the river. Before reaching the grandstands the drivers slid through a tight hairpin bend around a restaurant - both still there and little changed in a century. In 1914 the stands and the hillsides were packed in with hundreds of thousands of eager spectators. The race was to be a match between the French Peugeots and German Mercedes, between the hero of France George Boillot, winner of the 1912 and 1913 races, and the lead Mercedes driver Christian Lautenschlager. The French were expectant of victory; Peugeot and Boillot had won the last two Grands Prix, and Peugeot had also successfully raided the big new American race, the Indianapolis 500 in the last two years. Perhaps too they were aware of a much bigger contest brewing as the race was held only a week after the Archduke Franz Ferninand was assassinated in Sarajevo. In the event, they went away disappointed, after seven hours of racing, Lautenschlager had won, and Boillot's Peugeot had dropped back with tyre trouble, before it's engine ignominiously gave up on the final lap.
In the 1920s and 1930s the European continental racing scene flourished and many other Grand Prix races were created, some named for the nation, some for the local area, but nearly all taking the evocative French name that had become synonymous with top level motor racing. The original race continued to flit around France, visiting Strasbourg in 1922, in an area that would one day be directly adjacent to the city's airport, although the final turn of the course in a suburban town seems to have barely changed in the course of a century. The next year it was held near Tours, on yet another high speed triangular course. This race would be historic for the British as for the first time a British car and driver won a Grand Prix race, perhaps the long straights of the tree-lined boulevards near Tours suiting the Brooklands-honed Sunbeam car of the great record breaker Henry Segrave more than some of the more sinuous routes used in earlier races. This was the tail end of the great heroic pioneering era that had begun at the turn of the century. A year later, a mysterious English mechanic and driver called Ernest Eldridge would power down a two lane road south of Paris near the small town of Arpajon in a giant aeroplane-engined FIAT to set a new world speed record - the last time the fastest speed for a car would be recorded on the public road.
In the 1930s the French would be unseated from their position at the head of the motor racing table, first by the Italian Alfa Romeos and Maserati's, and then by the German teams, the state funded Mercedes and Auto Unions who would take motor racing to a whole new level of professionalism, dominance, and most of all, speed. Both the German and Italian Grands Prix would be held not on the public road, but on purpose built circuits. The Italian race was held at Monza, a super fast autodrome, with two interlinked tracks, a simple five turn road course and banked speedway that could be combined to create a daunting high speed race course. By contrast the Germans built a 14 mile long course with over one hundred corners - an approximation of a 'real' road, but totally artificial; the Nurburgring. The 'Ring was the perfect place for the upcoming 'Silver Arrows' to begin their dominance of the European scene. It was fast, but also supremely challenging to the car's handling, and could also be used for testing all of the time, unlike a public road. The German Mercedes and Auto Union cars became unstoppable - with the engine putting out huge power, and the chassis that could (just) about handle it. Even the French got in on the act of creating closed race courses that mimicked public roads, the Monthlery track in the south of Paris like Monza combining a speed bowl with a parkland road course. Meanwhile the automotive backwater of Spain built an astonishing creation near Barcelona. Autódromo de Sitges-Terramar was an oval speed bowl just over a mile long, but with banking angles up to sixty degrees. The track held but one Spanish Grand Prix in 1923 before going bust when the track's builders seized all the entrance takings to recoup payments they had not received from the organisors. Racing never returned but remarkably the track survives to this very day. Without the white-elephant of Sitges the Spanish instead turned to the Grand Prix of San Sebastian in the Basque country in the North. The San Sebastian GP around the Lasarte road course became the de-facto, and then the official Spanish Grand Prix.
Post War
If the 1920s and 30s had seen private race courses increasingly taking the share of racing away from the public roads, then the immediate post war years would bring back the road and city street race with a vengeance. With Germany in ruins, Britain's Brooklands turned into an wartime airfield, and America now occupying a parallel but very separate world based around Indianapolis, the French again came to the fore. The first major international motor race after the end of the Second World War was held on the seafront at Nice. It was a tiny course taking in a run up and down the promenade, and around a small garden, and it was never repeated, but it set the motor racing ball rolling again.
There would be a Grand Prix in around a park in Perpignan, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in the town of St Cloud - using a section of newly built motorway - St Gaudens, Sempione Park in Milan, and the first race to be called a 'Formula One' race in Valentino Park, Turin. These races would form the foundations for the first ever World Driver's Championship in 1950, they would provide the place where Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Talbot, Delage, and the new name of Ferrari, could hone their cars. They would also restart the war-interrupted careers of drivers like Farina, Wimille, Sommer, Villoresi, and Chiron, as well as providing a place where an Argentine champion called Juan-Manuel Fangio could arrive and begin to beat the Europeans on home soil. The races themselves would mostlyfade away after a few more years, the early carefree nature of post-war racing in the streets and parks of small provincial towns overtaken by the much grander events of the World Championship, and by a terrible catastrophe that would happen a few years later.
Though the racing may have mostly been consigned to history, that does not mean the roads that the greats of history once drove and battled on have disappeared too. All throughout the world, and in Europe especially, are public roads that once held races, driven on by people who, to a vast extent are probably unaware that their Toyotas and Hyundais are following in the wheel tracks of legends. That they are driving where Fangio, or Ascari, or Moss once drove, or riding where Agostini or Surtees once rode. There are some survivors of the great road races, the most obvious being the Le Mans circuit de la Sarthe. The famous twenty four hour race, held since 1923 outside the city of Le Mans in north western France, is still run on mostly public stretches of highway south of the city. Le Mans shows both the challenge and excitement created by racing on 'real' roads, and also the extent to which the roads have to be conditioned to be considered suitable in the modern world. At Le Mans drivers of the latest sports racing cars still have to cope with tramlines, a crown in the road, slippery painted lines and a rougher surface than is found on the racetrack. They also have the ominous sight of trees at the side of the road, trees that help contain the spray when it rains and create hanging clouds of mist - another hazard rarely found on open racetracks. But the drivers are now shielded from the trees by tiers of crash barriers, and race secure that should something fail on their car, or should they make a mistake, they will not end up among them.
Le Mans also shows the importance of location when it comes to the continued survival of the racetrack. Like many other road race circuits around Europe the Le Mans circuit is on the outskirts of a city - close enough to attract a ready made audience, and attract the support of a city and it's council, but just far enough away to have survived the onset of urban sprawl. When it first began in the 1920s, the Le Mans race ran right into a hairpin turn near the city centre, but quite early in it's life the hairpin turn was abandoned and the race held outside what was then the city limits. Those who made that decision were prescient; now the original course is in quiet suburbs, bisected in two by a tramway, and cut off completely from the current location by an autoroute. Some places in similar locations have not survived; Brooklands, the world's first ever purpose built racetrack, built south of London, was mostly swallowed up by housing estates, supermarkets and industrial estates in the decades after it was mothballed after the second world war. Had it not been for the fortunate intervention of a local businessman the great Indianapolis Speedway in the US would probably have suffered the same fate - swallowed up by the nearby city in the 1950s and 60s.
Ghosts
It isn't only private race circuits that can be obliterated by the passing of time. Even the very roads that once held races in some places have been demolished, re-routed, or altered beyond all recognition. Just like at Le Mans, the French cities of Reims, Rouen, and the town of Albi all had large race circuits, all entirely consisting of public roads, and all hosted F1-level racing (though only non-championship in Albi's case). In Rouen the track buildings were torn up in the 1990s, years after the last race and the back stretch became an autoroute. At Reims the buildings have been partly preserved - sitting like the ruins of Roman arena quietly at the side of the road, but, again a whole section is now a dual carriageway, and another section simply ends in the middle of a field - the former race track road plowed up when deemed an unnecessary piece of the local infrastructure. At Albi the once-rural circuit is still there in shape, but not in spirit; countless roundabouts, and new junctions reflect a huge boom in suburban housing that filled in the fields in the decades since the races of the 1950s. The only relics of the races; a small derelict race control tower and a small memorial stone to an Italian motorcycle champion who perished on the circuit in the early 1950s.
As well as being in a good location to ensure it's survival, the circuit of Le Mans had the great advantage of hosting a great marquee event. Reims and Rouen hosted the French Grand Prix - a premier event to be sure, but also an event that could be moved to another location on a whim, usually due to financial or political pressures. And that is just what happened to both venues in the 1960s. Reims last hosted the GP in 1966, Rouen in 1968, and while both tracks soldiered on (for many years in Rouen's case) without the lure of the Grand Prix they both faded away. In the 1950s and 1960s Grands Prix weren't always part of the Formula One championship; in the days before television contracts demanded all the teams, cars and drivers showed up to all 'official' races, there were many non-championship races, where organisers would put up prize and starting money and invite anyone who cared to show up. And the top drivers weren't contractually stuck with driving only for F1 teams. Many drove in Formula One, Formula Two, endurance sports car races, and even national touring car events. Some great road races were held on tracks that, because they never held full ''championship'' status, have faded into near-obscurity, despite playing host to some world-famous names. The aforementioned Albi circuit being an example of such; who, driving past some ordinary looking sports fields at the side of the road would guess that there was once a startline where the fields are now where, on one occasion in 1953, Fangio and Ascari, two world champions, both blasted away side by side to race in a non-championship Formula One race?
Some road races were simply overshadowed by a close competitor and faded away in the shadow of the more famous event. The Italian Mediterranean beach resort of San Remo held races in the 1950s, only short distance along the coast from the far more famous territory of Monte Carlo. Unquestionably the San Remo track was far larger, and just as challenging, as the very short confines of the Monaco Grand Prix, but it never came close to outshining it's neighbour and held it's last race in the 1960s. Monaco is the quintessential road road, a race that has been held on a circuit that has been little changed since it began in 1929. Clearly the Monaco Grand Prix owes it's survival almost entirely to it's extraordinarily privileged location, the playground of the rich with vast cachet for sponsors, but it's relatively compact location has also helped, and has inspired imitators around the world. The southern Los Angeles county city of Long Beach, California, began a street race in 1975, clearly modelled on Monaco, and almost the same size. The tiny south Asian country of Macau, like Monaco, has a track that runs from one end of the country to the other, down a seafront and back around the hill above the seafront. Macau is much larger than Monaco, several miles further round, and would probably be as well known if it hosted Formula One rather than Formula Three and touring cars.
The most extraordinary example of a self-contained race that fills and entire state is the Mountain Course on the Isle of Man. The thirty-odd miles of public roads hosts the 'TT' motorcycle races every year and constitute both an incredible challenge, and an incredible act of survival from it's founding in 1907 - when road races were the only form of race - to the modern world. The fact that the Isle of Man is self contained location, without any passing road traffic to any other places, without large cities or motorways, undoubtedly helps the continued survival of the TT races. The island also, by a quirk of history, has it's own parliament, independent of the mainland parliament, and can set many of it's own laws. Unlike England, Wales and Scotland, the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland allowed racing on public roads. As a consequence the TT races became the only place for British motorbike companies - Triumph, Norton, Royal Enfield et al - to race on public roads and also boosted the reputation of the races. Like at Le Mans, the TT races became far more famous than the championship they were part of, although unlike Le Mans the championship eventually left them entirely. Another quirk of fate that perhaps kept the races going into the modern world; had the TT races continued as top level motorbike races they would have surely been killed off by increasing safety concerns, or adapted into a much smaller and compact form, possibly on a purpose built circuit. Now the races are mostly contested by semi-professional specialist road racers - bike racers who race at weekends but often still hold down regular jobs and rarely, if ever, venture into the top level of Moto GP.
Danger
Clearly safety concerns have had a huge effect on the gradual decline of road racing circuits and their replacement by closed race tracks. Road racing is very dangerous. At the Isle of Man TT countless riders have been killed over the decades crashing into stone walls, lamp posts, buildings and trees. These hazards are largely absent from the wide open spaces of race tracks. Naturally it is hard for roads to be cleared of such hazards, and the only practical safety measure is expensive layers of metal guard rails or temporary concrete walls. It's not just the safety of competitors - open roads encourage spectators and it is hard to keep spectators in safe locations around large circuits. This is less of a problem for motorcycle racing, but has practically eliminated any form of car racing on open roads. Out of control cars are far more lethal than out-of control motorbikes. And motorcycle racers are far less likely to come into contact with each other than car racers. Races like the TT races are also held as time trials rather than wheel to wheel duels - racers start at staggered intervals and the winner is the rider who completes the course the quickest, not who get's there first, further reducing the risk of any dangerous pile ups
Some former road race tracks have adapted to the modern world by becoming closed circuit tracks. Spa is probably the most prominent example of this happening. Originally an eight mile high speed blast through the Belgian countryside, Spa had become a dinosaur by the late 1970s, with Formula One leaving after 1970, and considered far too dangerous for everything except touring cars by the end of the decade. In the early 1980s a new circuit was built by cutting the layout in half with a new piece of racetrack, and the Belgian GP successfully returned on the safer layout. Until well into the 1990s some parts of the track were still public roads, but by the 21st century the old roads had been completely incorporated into the racetrack and a new piece of the public highway built to bypass the track. In the 1970s a similar plan was concieved for Le Mans but never completed, still a few sections of new racetrack were built in the final section of the Le Mans circuit. The 'Porsche Curves' as they were called when they were built in 1972, bypassed a section of the original public road track called 'Maison Blanche' (White House), a very fast and narrow crest over a hill, followed by a quick right-left swerve round the 'White House' cottage.
After the cottage the road ran straight to the start and finish and pits area, and it was here that the terrible disaster at the 1955 race happened. The leading Jaguar of Mike Hawthorn slowed to pull into the pit area - in the 1950s just a layby at the road's edge, and caused the following, much slower, Healey driven by Lance Macklin to swerve left to avoid rear-ending the leading car. Macklin swerved right into the path of one of the Mercedes-Benz cars driven by French veteran Pierre Levegh. Levegh was launched off the sloping back of the Healey - these days such a multi car tangle would probably be relatively harmless, possibly leading to an heated argument among the teams after the race. But in 1955 the Mercedes flew towards a spectator enclosure, over a five foot high earth mound, and smashed at full speed into the crowd. There was no catch fencing to protect the spectators and scores were killed by the flying debris scything through them. For a time motor racing as a whole was placed in serious jeopardy; Grands Prix's were cancelled for the rest of 1955 in the race of the political outcry. Unsurprisingly the crash had the most dramatic effect on road racing circuits. Before 1955 the motor racing calendar was packed full of road races; after 1955 they began to become and endangered breed.
Decline
The most immediate casualties were the German, French and Swiss Grands Prix, which were cancelled. The French and German races would be returned in 1956, but the Swiss race never came back. Today the location of the Swiss Grand Prix, at Bremgarten in Berne, sits quietly, and un-commemorated on ordinary looking suburban streets. Much of it is now cycle tracks through a forest. Other races that faded away after the mid-fifties include the championship Spanish grand prix through the streets of Barcelona at Pedralbes. In the early 50s the area was at the very edge of Barcelona, with only a few villas and churches at the road side, by modern times the roads were packed with houses and apartments. Like in Switzerland it would be very hard to tell that there was once a grand prix race through the urban boulevards. Many of the roads have been completely rebuilt, with tramlines, underpasses and flyovers.
The non-championship races in the streets of Bordeaux, Bari, Rome, Angeouleme, Marseilles,Valentino Park in Turin, and on the quiet rural roads of Cadours, all faded away to become only a memory. Posilipo Park in Naples, and Chimay in Belgium downgraded to lesser formulae. Still others faded away for car racing but retained motorbike races that were easier to marshal and relatively more safe for spectators than cars. Such happened at Dundrod in Northern Ireland, where the top sports cars and drivers all turned out for a race in 1955, only for three drivers to be killed in crashes during the race. Cars never came back, but motorbikes still race around the exact same course even today. 1955 also saw a nascent Swedish Grand Prix on roads just outside the small town of Kristianstad. The dominant Mercedes combination of Fangio and Moss showed up and won in a formation demonstration but the event never grew and had a brief continued life for motorbikes, with an odd footnote - in 1961 an East German MZ rider defected during the race, riding his bike into the interested hands of Japanese mechanics curious to learn the secrets of the East German bike industry.
There were other terrible crashes too. In 1952, three years prior to the Le Mans disaster a little remembered incident at the strange German Grenzlandring circuit - a race around an oval shaped ring-road constructed just prior to WW2 for military usage - claimed fourteen spectators lives. In 1958 at the Cuban Grand Prix in pre-Fidel Castro Havana seven spectators died in a crash. This came hours after the sensational kidnapping of Juan Manuel Fangio by pro-Castro rebels; Fangio was approached by a pistol-wielding man in the lobby of his hotel and asked to come with him to a local house. Fangio was released without harm, in fact the rebels had served him steak dinner, after the race, but both the incidents led to the end of the Cuban Grand Prix. A year later the socialist revolution swept Fidel Castro to power and the capitalist resort packed with the rich of Europe and America that was so amenable to motor racing was replaced with a very different place, with racing and casinos replaced with embargoes and poverty.
Changing political situations naturally have had an effect on racing venues over the years. The Spanish Grand Prix of the 1930s, held on a very exciting 11 mile road course near the town of Lasarte-Oria, came to a sudden end with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The great circuit never held races again. In the 1930s North Africa was a popular area for hosting races, as the countries there were still European colonies and imported European racing. In Morocco and Algeria the effect of French influence was felt with Grands Prix in Casablanca and an Algerian Grand Prix that moved between several street layouts. In Italian-run Libya the Tripoli Grand Prix became a blue riband event with a large prize fund and very expensive facilities - a forerunner of today's purpose built circuits. But the Second World War brought the race to a sudden end, and when the conflict was finished a large US Air Force base was built over most of the area where the race track had once been. When Colonel Gaddafi came to power in 1969 the base became an international airport. Today the route of the race circuit is still visible on satellite pictures, but no tourists would dare to venture into the stricken country of Libya to visit the area, and the days when international racing was once hosted there seem almost impossible to believe.
The Moroccan Grand Prix had a brief resurrection in 1957 and 1958, the latter year becoming famous as the race where the title was decided between the duelling Englishmen Mike Hawthorn and Stirling Moss. Moss won the race, on the purpose built Ain-Diab course, but Hawthorn followed him home in second to win the championship. Moss, who had won four races in the year to Hawthorn's one, never would win the title, and Hawthorn would be killed in a crash a few months later on a bypass in England. The Moroccan Grand Prix disappeared without much notice after that year and the rectangular Ain-Diab course became part of suburban roads, with no remnants of the old race track remaining. Racing in Africa would thereafter be confined mostly to South Africa, and even there the sanctions on the Apartheid government would lead to few international events. Even the great Paris-Dakar Rally across Saharan-Africa would be driven to move to South America by political problems and security threats in the countries it crossed.
Italy
Italy would become the last great bastion of road-racing in the 1960s and 70s, but even in country so associated with performance cars road racing became rarer and rarer during this time. The greatest of all Italian road races was the Mille-Miglia (Thousand Miles) race. The race ran from Brescia in Northern Italy, down the Adriatic coast, across the central hills of the country to Rome, and back north to Brescia. Like the Isle of Man TT the race was against the clock, with hundreds of starters leaving the start ramp throughout the day of the race. The race was held on closed roads but all around the course spectators would crowd around to watch, and it was these spectators who led to the end of the race after the 1957 running when a Ferrari driven by Spanish aristocrat Alfonso de Portago spun into a crowd in a small village near the finish in Brescia and killed nine people at the roadside. The event was revived in the 1970s but as non-competitive historic car rally rather than a race. The record time for the original Mille Miglia, set by Stirling Moss in a Mercedes in 1955, a few weeks before the fateful Le Mans race, will stand forever at twn hours and seven minutes, averaging 99 mph for the trip around Italy.
After the end of the Mille Miglia the mantle of great Italian Road Race passed to the Targa Florio in Sicily. The Targa was a tiddler compared to the Mille Miglia, but it was still a substantial challenge. Where the Le Mans twenty four hours raced around an eight mile long course, and the Nurburgring Six Hours around a twelve mile course, the Targa Florio ran around forty five miles of country roads for eleven laps. The race was part of the World Sports Car championship until 1973 when the concerns about marshalling and protecting spectators over such a long course finally killed off the event. A few years afterwards the event was revived as a rally - a change reflecting the increased prominence of rallying and the blurring of the lines between road racing and stage rallying. In the 1950s and 60s rallying was a test of machinery and navigation, and was done in modified road cars. By the 1970s rallying was increasing in performance, with more purposeful machines like the Ferrari-engined Lancia Stratos being introduced to the forests and roads. Road racing was giving way to rallying as the place where manufacturers were placing their focus. Even by the mid 1960s many sports car world championship entrants were finding the very twisty roads of the Targa Florio to be unsuitable for their ever-faster circuit racing cars and were creating lightweight specials to race purely in the Targa.
The third great Italian road race was the races held in the Adriatic coast town of Pescara. The races ran around a fifteen mile course from the town, up into the hills overlooking the sea, and back to the town by way of two four mile straights. In 1957, still in a climate of uncertainty about which Grand Prix's would be viable after the Le Mans disaster the Pescara race became a World Championship round for one unique occasion. The race was won, almost inevitably, by the great road racing expert Stirling Moss, who dominated throughout. It would not be repeated as a full-blown Formula One race though, despite the huge crowd that turned up to watch. The fall out from the Mille Miglia crash was being felt throughout Italy. Even the Vatican added it's voice to the mix, condemning the deaths of spectators at the expense of mere entertainment. True open road racing, on roads closed off on the day with a few road blocks, and spectators sitting having picnics at the side of the road was already on the wane, even in car-crazy, and politically laissez-faire Italy. For the next few years the Portuguese Grand Prix at Porto would take Grand Prix cars across cobble stoned roads and tramway lines for the last ever time. The 1960 race would be the end of an era for Grand Prix racing, and the winner was Jack Brabham - who hated the road racing tracks ("bloody dangerous") in a small lightweight British-made Cooper car that was developed on the airfield racetracks of Britain's club scene.
Throughout it all the one race that carried on regardless was the Monaco Grand Prix. Ironically Monaco's anachronistic nature and the total unsuitability of the extremely slow and tight circuit for racing probably ensured it's survival because it was too slow to be particularly dangerous. Only two drivers have ever been killed at Monaco during it's years as a Formula One venue, and one of those was in a supporting sports car race. By contrast when the resort town of Deauville at the opposite end of France created a Grand Prix in 1936, the course, running along the seafront, was wide and fast - too fast perhaps, as the up and coming French driver Marcel Lehoux died after a collision with another youngster, future inaugural World Champion Giuseppe Farina. The sight of flaming wreckage and a broken driver's body lying in the neat gardens didn't provide the best advertisement for motor racing and Deauville went back to hosting horse races instead. The tight Monaco layout meant there were never many places for drivers and spectators to put themselves in harms way. Most of the spectators were watching from apartment balconies and rooftops. And it was easy to put barriers around the course and police it properly. Monaco may have been there because of money and snobbery, but the organisers always knew how to run their race properly. By contrast there were places that were less well organised. In the late 1960s the Spanish Grand Prix found an exciting new home around the streets of Montjuic Park in central Barcelona. The circuit had held more minor races since the 1930s, and was extremely attractive, with all kinds of corners, elevation changes, trees, and striking buildings in the surroundings. Sadly after 1975, when the safety barriers were not installed correctly and drivers nearly boycotted the race, then a crash during the race that killed three spectators, the circuit was abandoned.
Relics
Like many other road circuits Montjuic Park is still there in it's entirety, only a new roundabout interrupting the course of the original. All around Europe are other circuits sitting still, with almost no evidence of the races that once happened there. In Italy the fifteen miles the Pescara Grand Prix was run on - forever remembered as the longest ever World Championship circuit - are all still there, albeit with a few new overpasses to accommodate an autoroute, and a few newer business parks and residential developments at the roadside. Only a large sculpture of a pre-war racer half way around the course provides much evidence of the race. The main street through the town of Pescara appears to have changed little since 1957, when Moss streaked away to a lead he was never to lose over the next two hours of racing. Moss and the others would have seen a fairly similar view to today. The race would have taken them past the main railway station in Pescara, up a straight section of densely packed buildings, before taking a right turn at a junction and heading up a twisty and narrow road up a hillside, with views one side inland and on the other occasional glimpses of the sea. As with many of the longer circuits it must have been challenging to remember exactly where on the circuit the driver was, as the various bends and crests of the road seem to blend together into one.
Unlike modern drivers those who faced racing on such challenging, and complicated courses had to devote much of their concentration to simply driving the course, rather than racing their rivals. Cars were much less reliable and drivers far more exposed to danger. On a circuit like that at Pescara the driver had somehow to put out of their minds what would happen if they ran wide off the road into a ditch, or spun off into a tree, or their car failed and they hit a wall or building. Then there were the final eight miles consisting of two flat out blasts along four mile straights at speeds of up to 180 mph. Some road races were undoubtedly more dangerous than others. At the Targa Florio, for example, the extremely twisty and narrow roads kept the average speeds relatively low, and the event had surprisingly few fatalities. By contrast at Spa-Francorchamps the roads were wide, and fast. By the time of the last Formula One and sports car races the average lap speed was nudging 150 mph - between houses and trees.
The current Spa circuit is much beloved by the current generation of drivers but is half the length of the 'old' Spa, and far less daunting. The original layout of Spa is still there, looming like a sinister shadow over the current racetrack. Where the current track turns sharp right at the end of the main straight and runs down into a valley, the original course instead took a long left turn over the brow of a hill in the opposite direction. It then ran down a hill along a slightly curving straight, where racers would fly past farmhouses at very high speed, into a very fast right hand corner, that could have been designed with high speed racing in mind. Now there are more houses and junctions, but the famous farmhouse where several famous names - including Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill - crashed out in a cloudburst in the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix is still there, mostly unchanged. The Belgian weather also added to the dangers of Spa, where the sunnier Mediterranean climbs could hold road races in almost guaranteed warmth and sunshine the Belgian Grand Prix was often held in the rain. The rain would often lash the drivers as they headed along the back straight - now interrupted at the beginning by a new roundabout - past open fields towards a quick left-right flick between houses at the hamlet of Masta. Through the kink at speeds of over 150 mph they would head down towards a road junction at the village of Stavelot, but then ease themselves into a fast rising right turn, built to bypass the village itself. The turn is also still there, overgrown and cracked. The mist would hang in the trees on the return leg, through a gloomy looking forest to rejoin the current track again.
Spa was undoubtedly the fastest ever road racing circuit used in motor sport, but it was hated by many great drivers for being too risky and too reliant on their cars holding together on the long straights. For the same reason some drivers also disliked having to drive at Le Mans too, in the days when the trees were not hidden behind barriers. Nostalgia tends to create a great respect for the old Spa, and Le Mans but there were many other road circuits that were just as daunting as those tracks, but somewhat more challenging for the drivers too. However these tracks never attained the same status as their more illustrious counterparts. Some still survive, as Spa has, as permanent circuits incorporating parts of the original roads. In the far south of Sicily, not too far from the roads of the Targa Florio, is the obscure Autodromo Siracusa (Syracuse). Little in the area would lead anybody to suspect that the circuit was once a much larger road circuit that hosted non-championship Formula One races. The modern track, like Spa, uses some of the old roads, but for the most part is an anonymous modern racetrack, and the surrounding roads have been gradually built-up with houses, warehouses, and business parks. Here and there are small remnants of the former circuit - the most distinctive feature of the old circuit was the low brick walls that the road, The walls are still there where the road leaves the highway headed to dusty dead-ends where the modern track sits, looking like alien relics from a different era, an era where it wasn't unusual for stout brick walls to line the very edge of a road. And an era when spectators and photographers would sit on the walls to watch. In the eventful year of 1955 the English driver Tony Brooks won what was probably the venue's most notable victory. Driving a British built Connaught (an obscure make that would never win a championship race) Brooks took the first Grand Prix win by a British driver in a British car since 1923. Ironically Brooks was a great enthusiast of road racing, and admired the Syracuse circuit's challenging walls as they encouraged precision, but his win for Britain would be a precursor to the era of success for British makes, and their cars honed on airfield circuits, who would take over as the road race largely a thing of the past.
Road racing didn't die out overnight after the traumas of 1955. Even ten years after Tony Brooks won at Syracuse on dusty Sicilian roads, the great 'Flying Scotsman' Jimmy Clark would drive to victory in a non championship race on closed roads. This particular event was the 1964 'Solituderennen', the last hurrah of a the astonishing Solitudering - a seven mile open road track winding through trees on the outskirts of Stuttgart. Today Stuttgart is renowned as the home of both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, and their museums attract many visitors, but for real tangible motoring history, the old Solituderennen sits almost unchanged, but for a few modern roundabouts, almost waiting for another race to be held there. The circuit gave away a good mile to Spa, and was not nearly as quick, but more than made up for it with it's sheer variety. From the start and finish area, the road ran sharply uphill through two hairpins, then flew through a forest taking drivers through the holy-grail of corners for the racer and spectator; the almost flat out, blind bend over a crest, requiring full commitment and skill to maximise the speed through the trees. After several miles of knuckle-whitening high speed, high precision corners, the track rolled down to a tight left hander into the base of a river valley. From this corner it then returned to the start area by way of a sinuous road hugging the edge of of a river, every corner leading directly to the next, meaning the driver never got a moment's rest. There is no clear reason precisely why the Solituderennen faded away from the racing scene in the mid-1960s, after forty-something years of motorcycle and car racing, plus the great international success of Stuttgart's car makers. Perhaps it could no longer survive in the shadow of the famous Nurburgring, and it maybe already the writing was on the wall for such a perilous circuit. Fortunately urban sprawl has never reached the forests where the Solitudering sits and the modern visitor can still drive the roads and marvel that Clark and company used to race their spindly little cars on such dramatic roads.
It is arguable that the Solitudering was the most dramatic road race course that Formula One cars have ever contested races on. Certainly the Pescara track was longer - although a great deal of the fifteen-mile track was eight miles of straightaways where the driver had to take a back seat to the engine and simply hang on. And the race was, when all is said and done, a one off, and, thanks to the genius of Stirling Moss, not much of a racing contest. Certainly if asked to nominate the most extraordinary road circuit a case could be made for the bizarre AVUS ring, used just once in 1959 for the German Grand Prix. AVUS was built before WW2 as one of the first sections of autobahn, and turned into a high speed race track by the addition of a giant 'Wall of Death' - a huge 180 degree brick banked turn at the top end of the circuit. The racers of the 1930s would blast up and down the motorway - exceeding 200 mph - and hang on round the banking. After the war the circuit
continued, with the one-off Grand Prix, and would survive well into the 1990s as a touring car venue, but the great brick banking was demolished and the motorway sections were continually cut back. Today some features of the track have been preserved; an old motel still displays the Mercedes Benz logo, and the footprint of the banking is still there as a lorry trailer park - it is a surprisingly tight radius, perhaps the legend makes the great banked corner seem larger.
Monjuic Park is often touted as the greatest Formula One street circuit, and certainly it was an exceptional layout considering it's short length. But it was still a city park circuit rather than a genuine open road race. At the same time in the early 1970s the French Grand Prix paid several visits to roads around the mid-size town of Clermont-Ferrand (home of Michelin tyres). The Clermont Ferrand track ran around hills west of the city, and was renowned for being a great 'rollercoaster' ride for the drivers, so much so that the winner in 1970, Jochen Rindt, was supposedly motion-sick in his car during the race. The circuit's time in the limelight was brief; from the mid-sixties to the 1972 French Grand Prix. Like at Solitude the roads are still there almost unchanged, decades after the last F1 races were run. What is striking about them is how dramatic and twisty they are; roads that the modern mind associates more with a rally stage than Formula One, and how totally unsuited to the modern requirements of television coverage and VIP wining-and-dining the location is. The road is lined with trees and flint riddled earth banks. There do not appear to be many places for spectators to watch; the circuit is all about the challenge for the driver. A smaller club race track incorporates parts of the old start finish line and track, but is much shorter than the Grand Prix circuit.
Far from the traditional European home of Formula One lies a dark horse contender for the title of Greatest Ever Formula One track. These days the 'off' season in racing consists of sponsor announcements and testing times. But in the 1960s many top F1 drivers would travel to the Antipodes and race in the Australasian 'Tasman' series; an unofficial 'winter' F1 tour taking in the race tracks of Australia and New Zealand. Many of these were fairly ordinary airfield or club race tracks but when the series visited it's namesake - Tasmania - the drivers headed around the road circuit called Longford. Longford was in the middle of nowhere-in-particular. The biggest evidence of civilisation was a corner in the small town of Launceston, where the cars would race past the front door of the local watering hole. In four miles of roads (about the same as modern Spa), the track ran across fields, took a sharp left turn under a railway viaduct, crossed an overgrown creek, passed farms and livestock, and over a long wooden road bridge. Contemporary pictures show what is perhaps the oddest juxtaposition in the history of Formula One; Jimmy Clark, Graham Hill, Jack Brabham, and the rest driving their single seaters over a rural Australian bridge, inches from a white painted wooden slatted fence. Alas, the Tasman series faded away in the late 1960s, as the European schedule would take priority for the increasing number of sponsors arriving in the sport keen to get their logos on the televised races. It would be 1985 before the Australian Grand Prix would finally become a full fledged championship race, but not in the sheep and cattle farming backwaters of Longford, Tasmania but in the old Victorian colonial city of Adelaide, on a street circuit that would write some of it's own lore in racing history.
Amazingly for all it's unfettered challenges Longford was not the most challenging circuit to have hosted the Australain Grand Prix. The name stretches back to the 1920s and among the list of venues is the occasional mention of a place called Loebethal. Those in the know - the historians, the history enthusiasts, the locals - will mention the place with superlatives and words that seem more suited to a great mythical legend. The Loebathal track, the enthusiasts will say, was ''something else'', a real man's course. The races were held in the 1930s but survived briefly after the war. The course ran for eight miles around the small town of Lobethal in South Australia. It didn't start from the town, but from a junction several miles away. From there it ran along very fast roads to a 90 degree junction, where the drivers put their foot flat to the floor and climbed the hill up towards Loebethal town. There they held on tight around a left right sequence before dropping down in the centre of the town. In case they overcooked the braking for the junction in the town the run-off area was the entrance to a mill. Flying out of town they had to negotiate a tricky right hand bend before entering a breathtaking roller coaster section that could have been lifted from the Nurburgring itself. Here was where one driver of time remembered he would aim and commit for the corner over the blind crest because once the car got airborne there was no way to correct it's course. Even by the standards of the time the Loebathal course was thought dangerous, and only a few motorcycle and car grands prix were held before it faded away, and the housing developers gradually built up the farmland at the roadside. Loebethal is still there to be driven aroud, albeit surrounded by many more houses than when it was a race track. Longford is not so lucky. Astonishingly although the area is still mostly farmland much of the track is now abandoned and derelict - the local roads have been re-routed. The wooden viaduct is gone, now there is only a forlorn gap across the river.
Staying Relevant
The 1970s were a decade of decline for road race circuits, and by the 1980s motor racing was mostly held on either racetracks or city street tracks. But, like all rules, there were exceptions. Formula One and sports cars may have gradually left open road tracks but deep in the countryside of Czechoslovakia in the the European Touring Car championship found time to attack the Masarykring at Brno. In the 1930s, before the catastrophes of the War and afterwards, big time racing had many events in Eastern Europe. The Masarykring was just one relic of that time, a great road circuit that was graced by the greats; Caracciola, Nuvolari, Rosemeyer, etc. The Masaryk Grand Prix was held on an 18 mile long circuit from 1930 to 37. After the war the circuit was cut in half and reduced to a more manageable 11 miles, then down to eight, and then finally 6.79 miles, and enjoyed a curious time in the limelight in the mid-1980s, when the ETCC's profile was raised as the championship became a grudge match between the works teams from BMW and the one time Le Mans racers Jaguar. More barriers were placed on the circuit, trying to keep it in line with updated safety requirements. Motorcycle races lasted until 1982, and the last big touring car race was held in the 1986. In the same year the new Hungarian Grand Prix debuted at the purpose built Hungaroring near Budapest. Even though it would be three more years before the Iron Curtain began to crumble, the Czech authorities decided to follow the Hungarian example and build a modern autodrome, appropriately in near the town of Brno, inside the footprint of the original pre-war road course.
Racing at the old circuit at Brno may now be only a fading memory, and the modern circuit may have little of the character of the old, but the circuit allows the area to retain it's motorsport tradition into the modern era. Some racing, at least, is better than no racing at all. Romance and nostalgia may be fine for history books, but practical realities mean that if racing is to take place in most places where people live, it is going to be on contained closed courses, not out on the streets that have filled with much more traffic and development even since the 1980s. The Masaryk circuit may still be there, but there are more houses around it now, and roundabouts, pedestrian crossing islands, bus stops and all the other street furniture. In this respect Brno is not alone; quite a few modern autodromes are built in places that once hosted races on much larger, more daunting circuits that would be totally impractical to today's world. The Mugello Circuit, a well liked high speed road course in the very centre of the spine of Italy sits in the shadow a 40 mile road circuit in the hills. The Mugello 'Stradale' circuit, as it is known, was a counterpart to the Targa Florio when it began in the 1920s, but it never gained nearly as much status, mostly because of it's on-off hosting; after the 1920s it was revived in the 1950s only to stop again until the mid-sixties, when it lasted until 1970 before even the car-crazy Italians decided there was no practical way to run a forty mile long race circuit in open countryside, even with a time-trial format. The modern facility was built not far from the old start line and pit lane (still visible as a extra-wide street) in a small town.
Mugello's main event these days is the Motorcycle Grand Prix, and the circuits that host motorcycling in particular have tended to follow the pattern of turning old road courses into closed race courses. The German Moto-GP for example, is held at the Sachsenring, a two mile circuit that shares a start line with the old Sachsenring, a six mile road circuit that ran into the nearby town, up through fields to the edge of the nearby autobahn, before flying back to the start line through very quick tree-lined turns, dips and crests. The Sachsenring was in the former East Germany, and through the 1960s and 1970s hosted the East German Grand Prix. When the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunited the track was given the honour of hosting the reunified German GP and redeveloped into the current course, with the intention of briging the international scene to the former eastern half of the country. Economics have often dictated that tracks that have previously focused on motorbikes must nowadays accommodate car races, plus track days, and other major events like music festivals, and as such have been redesigned to become more easily adapted for different uses. Such is the case at the Dutch 'Mecca of Motorbikes' at Assen - once there was a four mile course, with much of the mileage in a large rectangular route at the start of the lap. Nowadays the old first half of the lap forms the perimeter roads of car parks and an nearby amusement park, while the track twists back on itself in a tighter complex of corners. The old circuit may have been more open and scenic, but it was also more wasteful of space, with a large empty infield of little practical use. Sad perhaps, but also an unavoidable truth, as developers encroach on racetracks, the tracks often have to maximise the value of their land.
In recent years the history of motor racing has begun to attract more interest from the outside world. There are a great many historic racing festivals around the world, some on modern race tracks, some along the roads of the original road races. Perhaps enough time has passed for it's relics to take on the mould of genuine historical artifacts rather than decaying ruins. Perhaps too, the passing of most of the great names from the heroic eras of decades past has raised them from mere sportsmen to legends, and suddenly the cars they drove and the places they raced are now the only tangible connection to a lost era, and consequently are attracting renewed interest. Then there is the information revolution - suddenly people can find out all about the history of their local area, and in moments find pictures, film and descriptions of races that once happened on their own doorsteps. Then too there is the matter of the sanitisation of modern racing, in terms of safety, variety of locations, and the characters on the track. While no fan wishes to return to the days when many drivers died, either because the cars couldn't withstand crashes or needlessly because of poor rescue and medical facilities, many grumble that the standard template for the modern racetrack is too bland, that the never ending drive for safety is removing some of the thrill of the race. The venues of the past have a romanticism and nostalgic appeal that many find lacking in tracks today.
The fourteen miles of the Nurburgring Nordschleife, built as a purpose built racing track in the 1920s, are symbolic of the increased interest in historic race tracks. After big time racing finally left the track in the 1980s the owners decided to promote the track's open days - when the track was open to the public for a charge to drive it. Twenty years later thousands of visitors from around Europe were flocking there each year for the chance to drive flat out without needing to observe speed limits. Many other race tracks around the world have followed suit with the idea of the 'Track Day'. The Nurburgring has gone from being a race track to a "Touristenfahrten" - tourist road, as well as the world's most prestigious road car test track. Ironically enough one of the uses it was originally built for in the 1920s. Several major road car companies now have test bases there, quite a turn around for a place that was once shunned by Formula One and the World Sportscar Championship. Into the 2000s racing series have increasing struggled to attract the attention of car manufacturers and those that do take part mostly do so for marketing reasons. The Le Mans 24 Hours still maintains a high profile, arguably higher than F1, for the car makers, and much of that is probably down to the eight miles of high speed road racing circuit, so unlike anything that remains in Formula One.
Road races do survive today but they are mostly the preserve of the more amateur end of the racing spectrum. The Isle of Man TT remains the most obvious example of the 'Weekend Warriors' but there are others. The FIA European Hillclimb championship, once a high enough profile series that it still attracted F1 drivers up to the 1960s. Nowadays it is still going, supported by enthusiastic semi-pro and amateur drivers, who bring their rally cars and old Formula cars and drive up mountain roads at often insane-seeming speeds. The openness of the rule book is part of the appeal - the so called "Run what ya brung" series , as it is colloquially known in America. While spectacular, it is still dangerous. Lionel Regal - a top driver in the series, who's on-board videos are all over the internet, died when he lost control of his race car and crashed into trees at the Saint Ursanne hillclimb in 2010. In America the historic Pikes Peak hillclimb, up twelve miles to the 14,000 feet summit of one of America's highest peaks, still runs every year. As does the 'Silver State Classic' - a open road time trial race along Nevada's empty desert roads that is free to anyone to enter as long as they complete a safety check and attend a driving school run by the organisers.
Many of the places that once hosted racing have come to have revival events in recent years. In England the Goodwood festival and revival events have provided the model, where drivers bring their historic cars for the public to see. The concept has inspired an event at Reims, based naturally at the old pit buildings. Solitude in Munich too has a historic event where the roads are closed for the racers. The Targa Florio rally takes in many sections of the forty four mile circuit, the country roads mostly unchanged since the days when Championship Ferraris and Porsches raced around them. The Mille Miglia rally takes in the route of the races, attracting celebrities, and many of the world's most valuable collector cars for the drive around Italy. They still pass the memorial to Alfonso de Portago's crash, on the side of a ruler straight road among fields. In Australia the Longford pub and hotel attracts enthuisasts to a historic car meeting. The Loebethal Grand Carnival was created as a historic car parade, and it's first gathering included many of the survivors of the original races there. Motorbikers, too have their moments of nostalgia. The old home of the Finnish Grand Prix, in the quiet town of Imatra, has hosted demo runs attended by former bike racing greats riding around the virtually unchanged rectangular course, a course that fell out of fashion in the 1980s. Even Le Mans is finding that the main event is being challenged by the supporting historic races, as many spectators wish to see the famous cars and drivers of the past just as much as they want to see the current cars. The road to the White House, where the terrible disaster of 1955 took place, is still there, but hidden behind the grandstands, VIP tents and car parks.
Even in this world of information, and with all the revivals, photos and videos, there are still some secrets seemingly lost to history, remembered by only a few. Perhaps the biggest of these is the 'Deuschlandring', the forgotten cousin of the Nurburgring. In the 1930s the Nazi controlled government decided to build a successor to the Nurburgring. It would be slightly shorter, but much faster, as befitting the fabulous Mercedes Benz and Auto Union 'Silver Arrows' of the era. As with much else that the Reich promised, the Deutschlandring was supposed to be the grandest race track in the world, but the war that Hitler wrought would be the end of it. The ten kilometres of would-be race track were built in the mid-30s, often by forced labour by prisoners, and finished and christened in a ceremony in 1939. Months later the war began, the racing stopped and the never used race track was forgotten about, merged into the public road network. They are still there, a curiously wide and flowing circuit of public roads in the countryside south of the city of Dresden. Some great road races left behind ghosts, all left behind legends, but some never hear the sound of engines at all.
