NASCAR and road courses

[ferris1248]

Road courses have been in NASCAR since beginning
A look at the uniqueness of the 12 Cup road courses
By Mark Aumann, NASCAR.COM
August 5, 2009
02:17 PM EDT
vp> If asked to define NASCAR Sprint Cup racing, most fans would probably describe it as a high-speed, oval-track sport. And for 34 out of 36 weekends, that's the case. But NASCAR's road-course racing roots run much deeper than you might expect.
Not only was the second race in 1949 referred to as the Daytona Beach and Road Course, but founder Bill France competed in and promoted races on the beach more than a decade before the meeting at the Streamline Hotel that led to the organization of the sanctioning body now known as NASCAR. And in the 60 years since the Strictly Stock division made its debut, only twice has the schedule failed to include at least one road-course event.

In fact, there were more road-course races (two) than paved tracks (Darlington) in 1954, and the 1957 schedule included five road-course races.

A total of 12 road-course circuits have hosted at least one Cup event, and they can be divided into three categories: permanent facilities, one-time temporary airport circuits and the unique beach-road layout that predated the construction of Daytona International Speedway.

In addition, Cup cars traveled across the Pacific to run a pair of road-course exhibitions at Suzuka in 1996 and 1997. And if you include NASCAR's three national divisions, the Nationwide Series has also raced at Mexico City, Montreal and Road Atlanta, while the Camping World Trucks have competed at Topeka's Heartland Park and Oregon's Portland International Raceway.

If there's someone who can provide expert commentary on what it was like to race stock cars on road courses five decades ago, it would have to be Marvin Panch, who can claim to have driven on eight of the 12 tracks during his career, posting two wins and 11 top-five finishes.

"I wouldn't say I was that good [a road-course racer]," Panch said. "It was just that I tried to run smart. I'd always go out and pick out my shut-off point. Regardless of how heavy the traffic was, I'd still shut off at the same point and everybody would have a tendency to overdrive it. You could overdrive a road course, that's for sure.

"Matter of fact, I was up at Watkins Glen. I was leading the race and stretching it out pretty good. I was with the Wood Brothers then. They came out with a signboard that said, 'Easy.' So I started shutting it off early and everything, and I picked up speed. So you can definitely overdrive a road course."

Even though the heavier, bigger cars weren't particularly suited for road-course racing, Panch said mechanics had ways to help make the cars handle better. Leonard Wood was one of the masters at setting up a car to turn both left and right.

"We set up the front ends," Panch said. "When you run an oval course, naturally you have more caster in the right front than you do in the left front, because you kind of want it to turn in in the turn. When we ran the road course, we'd set camber and caster on both sides. We'd figure out the side that had the most turns."

DAYTONA BEACH AND ROAD COURSE

Ormond Beach was the original site of numerous world land speed records, but with development increasing following World War II, France moved his temporary circuit to a spot in southern Volusia County, Fla., just north of Ponce Inlet. The 4.15-mile circuit included two parallel straightaways of almost two miles in length -- one used the paved two-lane Highway A-1-A, the other the hardpacked beach sand of the Atlantic Ocean -- connected by horseshoe corners through the sand dunes.

Unlike today when television contracts and ratings determine race starting times, Mother Nature had more of a say. Races had to start near low tide in order to allow for the maximum amount of beach on which to compete.

A total of 10 Cup races were held before the circuit was abandoned in favor of the new superspeedway on the mainland. Red Byron won there en route to his 1949 championship. Daytona Beach native Marshall Teague scored back-to-back victories in 1951 and 1952. And Tim Flock dominated the 1954 race, only to be disqualified, so he returned and took home the trophy the next two years. Paul Goldsmith went flag-to-flag in the 1958 finale, although Curtis Turner was just five car-lengths back at the finish.

Panch described what it was like racing on the beach and road course in those days.

"We came up the beach and turned at the North Turn, through the sand dunes and onto the pavement," Panch said. "Then down to the South Turn and bounced through the sand again, over to the beach and come back up. But the road has changed since we ran it. It just to be right straight down. And now, as you drive over there, it's pulled over a block to make room for the condominiums or whatever they are there.

"There was one house up on one of the dunes there to the right of the road when we raced down the road there."

Panch said the trickiest part of the circuit was making the transitions from the sand to the highway and back, because the turns had a tendency to look like newly-plowed fields in very short order.

"The main thing, the corners were not handling corners," Panch said. "The corners all tore up and you kind of bounced and leaped through there anyway. So you just kind of set it up to do that, and it would take care of itself down the pavement and back up the beach.

"Even if you threw it in the corner, you had to be careful so it wouldn't hook. It'd flip you."

Panch said picking out a braking point at the end of the paved straight was a matter of driving with the seat of your pants.

"The start-finish line was down near the south end, on the pavement," Panch said. "When you came down there flat-out, there was a kind of a hump on the road. When the car would go over that, it would leave the ground a little bit and when it settled, that's when you'd put the brake on to get through the South Turn. That was a good shut-off point."

LINDEN AIRPORT

Using runways and taxiways, a five-turn, two-mile temporary course -- with one right-hand bend -- was constructed at the New Jersey airport in 1954. And France opened up the competition to foreign cars, which resulted in an odd lineup of Jaguars, MGs, Morgans, Austin Healeys and a Porsche against the domestic products of the day. According to one report, a crowd of nearly 10,000 paid $4 to sit in temporary bleachers -- $3 for general admission -- and watch the field of 43 take the green flag.

Pole-sitter Buck Baker led the first nine laps in his Oldsmobile before a skirmish in one corner with Hershel McGriff's Jaguar forced him to give up the lead. Herb Thomas then took over in his Hudson.

Al Keller started seventh in a Jaguar XK120 entered by bandleader Paul Whiteman and methodically began to close ground on Thomas. The nimbler Jag roared into the lead on Lap 23 and was never headed, as Joe Eubanks was the only other car on the lead lap at the finish. Keller's victory remained the only one by a foreign brand until Kyle Busch drove a Toyota into Victory Lane at Atlanta in 2008.

A shopping center was built on one of the airport's runways in 2003.

WILLOW SPRINGS

The nine-turn, 2.5-mile road course about an hour north of Los Angeles was constructed in 1953. There is some dispute over the type of surface that was in place when NASCAR visited for the first time three years later. Originally designed with an oiled dirt surface, making it a rare dirt road course at the beginning, Panch contends that the track had already been paved with asphalt by 1956.

In any case, Willow Springs was one of the California native's favorites. He finished second to Chuck Stevenson in 1956, then won the race the following season as teammate Fireball Roberts made it 1-2 for the DePaolo Engineering factory Ford operation.

"I was very fortunate out there," Panch said. "I was able to win the race. It was a good road course. I liked it, naturally because I won there. You had a backstretch, a long straightaway, then you had to go through a series of esses. It wasn't too much different than Riverside."

The track continues to host a full schedule of events, including racing schools and vintage sports car and club racing.

ROAD AMERICA

NASCAR ventured into America's Heartland later in the 1956 season for its only visit to Elkhart Lake's Road America, a four-mile, 14-turn permanent course located between Milwaukee and Green Bay.

The 1956 race was notable for a number of reasons. First, it rained on race day, which made for one of the rare occasions in which NASCAR has run in inclement weather. Second, for all of Pete DePaolo's domination at Willow Springs, things couldn't have been much worse at Road America.

Clutch problems sidelined Junior Johnson and Bill Amick within the first 10 laps. Curtis Turner crashed out of the race before the halfway point. And Ralph Moody retired with transmission issues short of the finish, leaving Roberts as the sole factory Ford to make it to the finish.

Instead, it was Bill Stroppe's Mercury operation that found the silver lining among the dark clouds, with Flock and Billy Myers landing a 1-2 punch on the competition.

Road America never hosted another NASCAR Cup race, although the track remains busy, with AMA Superbikes, SCCA, American LeMans Series and SPEED World Challenge events on the current schedule.

WATKINS GLEN INTERNATIONAL

Sports cars raced in the streets of this New York village before a permanent track was built farther south and was best known for hosting the United States Grand Prix. Buck Baker led all 44 laps in the inaugural 1957 race, which was a relatively short 101.2 miles on the 2.3-mile circuit.

NASCAR didn't return again until 1964, when Billy Wade scored the fourth and final victory of his four-race Northeast winning streak. Sadly, he would die in a tire testing crash at Daytona during the offseason. Panch won in 1965, and then it wasn't until 1986 that NASCAR added the Glen to the schedule, where it's been ever since.

Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon lead all drivers with four wins each. Mark Martin won three in a row at the Glen, beginning in 1993. Rusty Wallace and Ricky Rudd are the only other drivers with multiple victories.

TITUSVILLE-COCOA SPEEDWAY

Talk about your incongruities. The "speedway" consisted of a 1.6-mile road course laid out on the site of the airport between Titusville, Fla. and Cocoa, Fla. The race -- the Indian River Gold Cup 100 -- was neither 100 laps nor 100 miles. Plus, it was run on Dec. 30, 1956, but still counted toward the 1957 championship.

A field of 15 cars were on hand, five of those being from the DePaolo Engineering stable. And to no one's surprise, once their main competition -- Paul Goldsmith's Chevrolet -- retired with a broken fan belt, they dominated the rest of the way. Roberts led a four-car sweep at the top, followed by Turner, Panch and Moody.

NASCAR never returned, but the airport remains in business.

KITSAP AIRPORT

In another unusual scheduling quirk, NASCAR ran two road-course races on the same day in 1957. While the eastern-based cars were racing at Watkins Glen for the first time, the west coast-based teams competed in the first -- and to this point, only -- Cup race held in Washington on a 0.9-mile temporary course in Bremerton.

Little is known about the specifics of the race, other than it was the first of four Cup wins for future two-time Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones. He, Lloyd Dane and pole-sitter Art Watts were the only drivers in the 14-car field to complete the entire 80-lap distance, with an average speed of just 38.959 mph.

The airport never hosted another race, but NASCAR returned some five decades later with a proposal to build an 83,000-seat permanent oval on nearby property, at an estimated cost of $345 million. However, local opposition to the track eventually won out and the project was shelved in 2007.

RIVERSIDE INTERNATIONAL RACEWAY

NASCAR made 48 visits to the nine-turn, 2.62-mile NASCAR course in California's Inland Valley between 1958 and 1988. A 46-car field showed up in 1958 for the inaugural 500-miler, which took more than six hours to complete. When Parnelli Jones crashed while leading, Eddie Gray assumed the top spot and led the final 43 laps for the victory.

After a two-year absence, the track hosted a 101-mile sprint in 1961, with Lloyd Dane winning. But it wasn't until 1963 that the series' upper echelon made the cross-country trip. Road-racing expert Dan Gurney wound up winning for the Holman-Moody factory team, a feat that wasn't lost on car owner Glen Wood, who decided to pursue Gurney the next time the series visited Riverside.

"We had Fred Lorenzen out there but he wasn't that good of a road racer," Wood said. "He turned it over twice, one in practice and again in the race. Ford had a contract with Dan and he had driven their car in the first race and won it. And we told them we'd like to have him drive one of our cars at Riverside. I think at that time, it was in January some of the time and then in the fall.

"Anyway, we got him in our car and he won three straight and he missed out one time because of some previous engagement and ended up driving for Bud Moore. We ended up running Bill Stroppe's car with Parnelli Jones and won with him. That made four in a row. And then we came back in 1968 and won with Dan again. It was just the happiest feeling in the world to go out to Riverside and win four or five times in a row. You go out there and fall out or wreck, and it's not a nice trip home."

All five of Gurney's Cup victories came at Riverside, as did both of Ray Elder's and Mark Donohue's lone NASCAR win.

But some of NASCAR's biggest names found their way into Riverside's Victory Lane. Bobby Allison won six times. Five of Richard Petty's six road-course wins came at Riverside. Darrell Waltrip scored five victories there. Tim Richmond was a four-time winner. Cale Yarborough and David Pearson won three each at Riverside. And Ricky Rudd, Terry Labonte and Rusty Wallace were two-time winners.

By the late 1980s, soaring property values and pressure from development forced the closure of the track. A shopping mall and residential neighborhood occupy most of the property that once housed the raceway.

BRIDGEHAMPTON RACE COURSE

Much like Watkins Glen, the post-war sports car boom hit Long Island. More than 40,000 fans, including celebrities and New York's wealthiest, attended the Bridgehampton Sports Car Races, which featured more than a hundred cars at its zenith. But several spectacular crashes, including one out-of-control car that hit three spectators, put an end to racing on the narrow streets and country lanes in 1953.

That fall, shares of stock were sold to begin the process of building a permanent racing facility in the area. And by 1957, a crescent-shaped track was constructed near Sag Harbor. The eight-turn, 2.85-mile course had a vertical elevation change of 130 feet, including a steep blind downhill turn following the track's longest straightaway.

NASCAR visited for the first time in 1958, with Jack Smith leading the entire distance of a 35-lap, 99-mile sprint. Bridgehampton returned to the schedule in 1963, as Richard Petty beat Fred Lorenzen by 25 seconds. Billy Wade outdueled David Pearson in 1964, but Pearson got the last laugh when he won one year later.

The track continued to host major races, including the Can-Am and Trans-Am series, but the cost of upkeep finally doomed Bridgehampton. The planning board approved a golf course on the site in 1998 and the track hosted its final races one year later.

MONTGOMERY AIR BASE

Using the airport runways, the temporary track at Montgomery, N.Y., was set up as a two-mile, three-turn triangular oval, which makes it somewhat unusual among the NASCAR airport courses. Drivers who raced there likened it to racing on three drag strips every lap.

Rex White, who ended up winning the race after local favorite Jim Reed missed a shift and blew the engine in his Chevrolet, said the cars came almost to a stop in the turns in an attempt to navigate the tight corners. As the race went on, huge clouds of dust obscured the view for most of the 5,000 fans in attendance, as drivers began to drop off the concrete runways and onto the dirt in an effort to make a cleaner entrance into the corners.

The circuit chewed up tires, so when Reed pitted on Lap 76, that allowed White to sail by. However, Reed was gaining ground when he over-revved the engine at the end of one of the straights and broke a valve spring.

The facility is now known as Orange Country Airport, and Reed keeps his private plane there, according to a 2008 story by Tim Michaels of the Times Herald-Record.

AUGUSTA INTERNATIONAL RACEWAY

In the first superspeedway building boom following the construction of the Daytona International Speedway, plans were drawn up to construct a two-mile tri-oval in Augusta, Ga. It never came into fruition, but a half-mile oval and three-mile road course were developed on the site.

A 500-mile race was scheduled for the road course in November of 1963, but lap speeds were significantly slower than expected and the race was shortened to a five-hour time limit, which wound up being 417 miles.

A crowd of 15,000 watched a stirring battle between Junior Johnson, Richard Petty, Marvin Panch and Fireball Roberts. Johnson went out first with a broken transmission, but Petty soon followed with pinion gear issues. That left Panch in the lead, but he also succumbed to transmission troubles, allowing Roberts to lead the final 14 laps and earn the $13.190 first-place check.

Ironically, six of the top-seven finishers in that race would be killed within a 12-month period. It would be Roberts' last Cup victory, as he would die of injuries suffered at Charlotte the following May.

NASCAR continued to race at the oval until 1969. In 2003, the entire facility was developed into a regional park.

INFINEON RACEWAY

When Riverside closed for good in 1988, the track then known as Sears Point Raceway was added to the Cup schedule the following season. A former dairy farm at the south end of the Sonoma, Calif., foothills, the 12-turn road course was constructed in 1968. The track hosted IndyCar, motorcycle, sports car and drag racing events the next two decades. It underwent a series of name and ownership changes before being purchased by Speedway Motorsports, Inc., in 1996.

An overflow crowd, many of whom were stuck in traffic for hours on two-lane Highway 37, witnessed Ricky Rudd's win in the inaugural race. Dale Earnhardt's lone road-course victory came in 1995. Jeff Gordon, born in nearby Vallejo, won three consecutive races beginning in 1998. He leads all drivers with five wins there.

Wallace, Rudd, Ernie Irvan and Tony Stewart are the only other drivers with multiple race victories at Infineon.








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[blue22]

alot of words that have nothing to do with fishin

[ferris1248]

You're a master of the obvious.

[blue22]

very correct sir, which leads me to believe, you obviously realize this is not the nascar site and we talk about fishing here

[ferris1248]

Oh really? I thought it was off topic.

With topics ranging from the weather to cholesterol to TV network reporting to Happy Birthdays to babies being introduced, it seems there are a variety of subjects being discussed here.

[FUTCHCAIRO]

YA CAN JUST ABOUT TALK ABOUT NEARLY ANYTHING YA WANT ON OFF TOPIC.I REMEMBER RUNNING A OLD HUDSON ON THE BEACH-A-1-A COURSE, HAD SOME GUYS Y'ALL MAY NOT REMEMBER, LEE PETTY, CALE YARBOUGH, WOODS BROS., PEARSON, JUST TO NAME A FEW. YA COOULD GO RACING FOR UNDER $1,000 AND YA MIGHT WIND $500 IF YA CAME IN FIRST. RACING IS A LOT BETTER NOW IF YOU CAN GET SPONSORSHIP, BUT IT TAKES A LOT OF GREENBACKS TO DO IT TODAY.
Y'ALL HAVE A GOOD ONE.
PA
SEMPER FI

[FHC]

ferris we going to pick on this post or you going to start anow one

[blue22]

I understand the fact that this is off topic, however it seems lately this is all you post about. I would think in the south there are several NASCAR forums you could seek not BBF.NET I would like to think you understand that there are alot of options for you and that. By the way I went through all your post 11 pages and 3 post had to do with fishing!

[FHC]

blue 22 if you don"t like what he post don"t read it

[blue22]

wish it wasn't presented for me to read. Tons of NASCAR options

[slowroller]

blue 22 if you don"t like what he post don"t read it

Same thing I was thinking.....

[ferris1248]

ferris we going to pick on this post or you going to start anow one

Just stay here for this conversation I reckon.

I'll start another for the Sonoma deal.

[ferris1248]

I understand the fact that this is off topic, however it seems lately this is all you post about. I would think in the south there are several NASCAR forums you could seek not BBF.NET I would like to think you understand that there are alot of options for you and that. By the way I went through all your post 11 pages and 3 post had to do with fishing!

If and when I get to go fishing again I'll post something about fishing. Until then I reckon I'll post about whatever I want, as long as I'm in Off-Topic.

You seem to be somewhat obsessed by my posting, what with taking the trouble to go look at my posts. Probably the best thing for you to do is not read anything I post.

[Harmsway]

Vrmmm, vrmmm, ferris. I hate NASCAR because it competes for my fishing time. But thanks for the history lesten, all the same.

[rocket]

very correct sir, which leads me to believe, you obviously realize this is not the nascar site and we talk about fishing here

In off topic folks talk about what they want. Stop bitchin. If you want to talk fishing, stick to that forum.