Taking It to the Streets
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 (sort of), 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 (page 038) to sprawling Formula 1 productions that fence off portions of cities, including two in the U.S. this year, in Miami and Las Vegas (page 014). 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 (page 024).
We also wonder whether street racing is as exciting as racing on purpose-built tracks (page 034). 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.
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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 (page 062), and we witnessed a fanatic group of amateur No Prep drag racers in Wyoming (page 080). In the end, these are our streets.
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