Great question Ray,
Vehicles driving on Right side of road, palm trees and a 100 + year old tree growing where the track went near water !
I am looking forward to the answer.
Ken H
Great question Ray,
Vehicles driving on Right side of road, palm trees and a 100 + year old tree growing where the track went near water !
I am looking forward to the answer.
Ken H
Oldfart, Yes I forgot those, - there was Kerpehi Domain too, one of the first race meetings I drove myself to in February 1967 and saw Jim Boyd in the Lycoming .. plus some V8 Coupes from the Pukekohe Car Club and elsewhere in the Waikato / Auckland regions.Originally Posted by Oldfart
" longer " so perhaps Longford in Tasmania - where the circuit ran right past the Local Tavern .As a Track now Long Gone, but the Pub still there !!
No, not Longford...
Catalina was 1m 512yards IIRC, Oran Park's longest version was about 1.6 miles, so I'm talking about two straights on a circuit each of over three miles. Longford was 4.5 miles, but that included three long straights with the longest about a mile, though it did have a good long windup with a very shallow corner onto it.
Neither of the circuits are in Australia. As I said about the first one, there's clues in the trees.
Is it Watkins Glen? The circuit used in 1948 was 6.6 miles.
I thought it might be the original Singapore track at Old Upper Thomson Road but all my guessing does not include the driving on the right side in modern day driving.
Come on Ray, how long are you going to test / taunt us ?
Ken
Last edited by khyndart in CA; 03-18-2019 at 07:52 AM.
graeme lawrence - V6 Ferrari and some Aussies raced on a narrow road race track similar trees next to it in Kuala Lumpa-Selangor Grand Prix and Malaya /Singapore in 1969 /1970.
Frank Matich hit a tree in his McLaren M10A 1970 ...is one of those trees the one?
Last edited by John McKechnie; 03-18-2019 at 07:24 AM.
No, no, no!
All these circuits you have mentioned have no long straights like this. I am talking about straights FOUR MILES long. Each.
Please, gentlemen, look at the trees.
Last edited by Ray Bell; 03-18-2019 at 09:46 AM.
AVUS-
At the time of opening, AVUS was 19 1⁄2 km (12 miles) long – each straight being approximately half that length, and joined at each end by flat, large-radius curves, driven counter-clockwise...WIKKIPEDIA
Not Avus...
And Avus had nothing of the bends I have shown anyway. In fact, the closest anyone's been was the first person to have a guess! And I don't mean which circuit he guessed, either.
I do hope that overnight someone will get this worked out...
Then I can throw this one at you:
Though it is true that there is already another one on the board.
Re " All these circuits you have mentioned have no long straights like this. I am talking about straights FOUR MILES long. Each.
Please, gentlemen, look at the trees. "
As Spike Milligan once said " I talk to the trees, thats why they put me away "
There is something unique about the appearance of many of the trees around this circuit...
It shows up in this painting:
Does that help?
Wild guess but the Vanderbilt Cup races held from 1908 to 1911 ran on a course in Savannah, Georgia. USA.
It had long straights up to 5 miles long and ran past trees "bearded with Spanish Moss. "
So it can be seen that this has not been a race track for a long time and the cars drive on the right side etc..
(Am I getting close Ray ?)
p.s. It was the Grant Ellwood tip that helped me, thanks.
Ken H
You got it, Ken!
I was delighted to drive around it and photograph it in 2014, what an eye-opener it was!
And thank you for telling me that is 'Spanish Moss'... I always wondered what it was from the first time I saw drawings of it in Peter Helck's book, The Great Auto Races.
I actually felt sure that others would have identified it from that alone.
Okay, chaps, let's press on with the second one... the pics (which I mistakenly thought I'd already posted, sorry):
Please note, these are not the circuit from which I posted the photo in post No. 151.
Benalla?You got it, Ken!
I was delighted to drive around it and photograph it in 2014, what an eye-opener it was!
And thank you for telling me that is 'Spanish Moss'... I always wondered what it was from the first time I saw drawings of it in Peter Helck's book, The Great Auto Races.
I actually felt sure that others would have identified it from that alone.
Okay, chaps, let's press on with the second one... the pics (which I mistakenly thought I'd already posted, sorry):
Please note, these are not the circuit from which I posted the photo in post No. 151.
Benalla was a triangle of roads on an area which later became a country airstrip...
From memory it was less than two miles around.
Once again a clue... the cars are driving on the RH side of the road.
But you've got me thinking, Grant...
How did you know about Benalla? It's a long, long way from VA.
I'm a Kiwi Ray, been living up here for just 20 years although before that I visited US often (and Australia). I'm moving to coastal North Carolina soon, should have been late last year but hurricane Florence damaged our house there. Benalla is one of those names that stuck in my memory from regularly reading one of your fine racing magazines back in the '60s, Sports Car -? I recall an article that described the testing crash that wrecked a Lotus 19, I think a journalist was driving? You can tell by the question marks that my memory isn't that great! Thanks for posting those track quizzes, very interesting and frustrating at the same time...
I first thought it might be Reims but wasn't sure about which side of the road they drive on in Belgium...
Yes, I thought you might be a South Islander who's found another part of the world to make home...
The Lotus 19 was crashed by the mechanic, Bruce Richardson, at Warwick Farm.
When you mention Benalla, I think you might be referring to Winton, which is near Benalla. It's a little circuit in a paddock which is actually a Common. The circuit I would refer to as Benalla was used just once and I don't think the meeting made it as far as actual racing before police intervened and stopped it all. That was about 1938.
I do like 'investigating' old circuits. As far as I know, and I've tried to find out, I am the only person who's seen every circuit on which the Australian Grand Prix has been held. And because I started driving around them and looking at them so long ago, many I've seen are simply no longer there.
When I did my jaunt around Europe almost three years ago I visited a number of old circuits, so I'll keep posting pics here and see who can pick them. US circuits weren't so numerous, but there were a few apart from Savannah.
And to Ken, the Vanderbilt Cup races were important at Savannah, but the US Grand Prize was held there as well. That would be the title to the races I'd put at the top of the list. There were others, too, I found in googling around. And I also found pictures of convicts working on the roads in preparation for the races, and that some new road-building methods were perfected in the course of their experimentation with making those roads better.
Reading this...
http://porschecarshistory.com/wp-con...FirstUS_GP.pdf
...will fascinate anyone on this forum, I'd reckon. And some pictures are pretty good too.
The one thing lacking about the Savannah circuits (I think there were three versions) is decent published maps. They are just hopeless!
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