We’ve been organizing sanctioned races on public roads since the dawn of motorsport. No reason to stop now.
We’ve all seared a track map of the perfect road course in our minds. These are public roads that wind around a nearby reservoir, cut through a patchwork of farmland, or—for at least one extremely irresponsible driver lamming it in Canada—around the island of Manhattan.
I have several, each corresponding to a place I’ve lived. My first street course was about eight miles long. Half tarmac and half gravel, it passed through pine and maple forests and circled the York County transfer station twice. This story originally appeared in Volume 19 of Road Track.In my mind, I’m a rally driver. I’ve stood in a pummeling downpour on a Welsh hillside, watching WRC cars buzz past on public roads. I seethed with envy: Those are our roads , and those are actual race cars. It is thrilling, uncanny, and infuriating to watch racing on public roads. For this issue of Road Track, Vol. 19: Street Racing, we soak in the phenomenon of what happens when actual racing hits the streets. This means everything from NASCAR’s first-ever big street race in the heart of downtown Chicago to sprawling Formula 1 productions that fence off portions of cities, including two in the U.S. this year, in Miami and Las Vegas . Or it’s rally racing on the narrow lanes of the Irish countryside, a high-risk series of sprints along stone walls and past flocks of sheep .We also wonder whether street racing is as exciting as racing on purpose-built tracks . It’s debatable, and it depends on the circuits. In Monaco, home of the most storied of all European grands prix, the glitzy, claustrophobic streets that Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher dominated have long been too narrow for the modern era’s larger, faster vehicles. The races are too often parades of cars locked in place by qualifying order.On the other hand, F1’s stop in Montreal, at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve winding around Notre Dame Island, is almost always a riveting wheel-to-wheel battle. Will the spectacle of Vegas overwhelm the racing, or will it follow Canada’s lead? We also have our own skin in the game. We went west and did speed runs on a closed road in a McLaren , and we witnessed a fanatic group of amateur No Prep drag racers in Wyoming . In the end, these are our streets.
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My BookmarksCaleb Miller began blogging about cars at 13 years old, and he realized his dream of writing for a car magazine after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University and joining the Car and Driver team. He loves quirky and obscure autos, aiming to one day own something bizarre like a Nissan S-Cargo, and is an avid motorsports fan.
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My Bookmarks\nBorn and raised in Metro Detroit, associate editor Lucas Bell has spent his entire life surrounded by the automotive industry. He may daily drive an aging Mustang, but his Porsche 944 and NB Miata both take up most of his free time.
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