As is always the case with the Lost Tracks we feature, please send along photos of your car on the track if you visit these forgotten race courses.
Even at the speed limit, the park roads look like a lovely drive in your classic. Roger Bartlow did somewhat better when he won the 1.5 liter class in the 1952 SCCA Nationals in his 1952 Simca Special, averaging 6 minutes 22 seconds. The 3.1 mile course should take your average commuter over 9 minutes. Google maps also helps us with the travel time of the track, at the speed limit of course. Maybe that’s because it was short lived the track only hosted events from 1952-1954 when, like other road racing circuits of the era, the spectre of safety required that events move to the closed, purpose-built tracks that have thrived since.Īlso like other road racing tracks of the era, the Road Racing Course at Golden Gate Park still exists as public roads, and thanks to Google Maps’s Street View, we can take a spin around the track from our desk chairs. I have to admit, however, there seems to be precious little about the circuit online. Rudy has commented on this post as well and included links to the tracks in the comments below.ġ952 Golden Gate Road Racing Program cover
#Trackmap for gtr2 simulator#
Update: Racing simulator designer and developer Rudy Dingemans has built a raceable version of Vaca Valley for the rFactor and GTR2 racing simulators, see our post on his efforts here. It seems that for the time being, Vaca Valley Raceway will continue to crumble. Later investigations as late as 2003 deemed the project too costly. In the meantime, there have been a few attempts to re-open the facility, but encroaching neighbors objected in the early ’90s, killing the plan. $15,000! Sounds like it would have been money well spent. Once the surface deteriorated, the owners nor the SCCA was able to pony up the $15,000 needed to bring the track up to par and it just wasted away. If you look at this Google Maps view, you can still see the bones of the old asphalt surface, slowly being perforated by nature.Īpparently the asphalt was never of the highest quality, and subsequent resurfacing did little to correct the problem. No encroaching suburban sprawl and angry homeowners drove the track to shut down. Nothing new has been built on it’s property. Vaca Valley, though, might be even sadder. Usually when we look at some of America’s forgotten racetracks, they invariably have been torn down and replaced with housing developments, shopping malls, and (worst of all) golf courses. Sounds pretty good right? Sadly, the track only lasted until 1972. There is - and I’m talking to the track designers out there when I say this - a reason why almost every slot car track you can find on toy store shelves has a crossover. It is not, after all, easy to blend run-off areas and kitty litter with bridge abutments. I can understand why this once enduring track feature went away. It recalls the classic Monza, with a tunnel under one end of the banked oval. There’s something magical about a track that loops back in on itself, tucking under competitors and passing, figure-8 style, beneath the action above. What it does have though, is the benefit of a marvelous feature of the Paramount Ranch race track: it has a tunnel. It’s is fairly ordinary in its execution and presentation. It isn’t amazingly well rendered or beautiful.
It isn’t the illustration of this track at Paramount Ranch, though, that drew me in. There’s always a lot to choose from, as the hand illustrated track maps of the age before satellite views tend to just have more soul than the long-on-accuracy-short-on-spirit CAD rendered maps of today.
#Trackmap for gtr2 series#
Usually in our ‘Track Maps of the Past’ series I try to feature beautifully rendered maps from historic racing programs.
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