While it is true to say that America has never really fallen head-over-heels in love with Formula One as a concept (in a display of anti-French sentiment that would have made awful windbag Bill O'Reilly proud, the first US GP in 1908 was stubbornly called the 'American Grand Prize'), it is also true to say that if ever F1 had a chance of finally sealing the deal with the American public, it was during its time at Watkins Glen. It was while F1 cars were barreling around the confines of The Glen that the sport was the closest it would ever get to whispering 'I love you' into the ears of the American public and actually hearing those three little words back.
When Bernie Ecclestone crowed about wanting a GP venue near New York City for his returning US event, quite a few people wondered why exactly he wasn't considering a return to F1's spiritual US home. Fair enough, it can't exactly be described as being on New York's doorstep, and you wouldn't get the Manhattan backdrop that Bernie wanted without giving the spectators opera glasses and a map, but it is at least as close as the Monticello Motor Club and far more evocative a venue than some random jumped-up test track for rich kids in their Corvettes and whatnot.
The Glen was the Mac Daddy of US GP venues, with the autumn time trip to upstate New York quickly becoming an F1 institution on the schedule. The first race at the track came after a pair of underwhelming and unappreciated one-off races at Sebring and the indescribably naff Riverside Raceway, and almost from the start it was a hit, with crowd numbers undoubtedly buoyed in that first year by the fact that America's Phil Hill had just been crowned the new F1 world champion, the first US-born driver to secure the title. Alas, Hill didn't enter the race itself, with his Ferrari team still mourning the death of team leader Wolfgang von Trips at the previous event at Monza and choosing to miss the final event of the season.
As the years went by, though, Watkins Glen remained a hugely popular venue. The mix of challenging corners, glamorous crowds and, probably above all, a winner's cheque some way in advance of the rest of the grands prix on the calendar in the 1960s, made The Glen a must-win event for the drivers. And it was a track that favoured the British limeys to an almost ludicrous extent. Jim Clark won there three times, as did Graham Hill, indeed from the inaugural event in 1961, the US GP would end with a British winner in every year until Jochen Rindt won the 1969 event for Lotus.
The Glen was also the venue for plenty of pioneering F1 idiosyncrasies that we all now take for granted. The first race at the track in 1961 saw Roger Penske's team turn up with a DuPont-coloured car, eschewing the de rigueur method of motorsport to that point of painting your car in the national colours of the team and (sort of) bringing sponsorship to the F1 grid some years before Colin Chapman's Gold Leaf Lotuses properly kicked-off the trend. The Lotus team themselves also pioneered the idea of team orders a few years later, with the fast-but-fragile Lotus 49 forcing the team's drivers Hill and Clark to toss a coin before the race to decide who would take the win rather than the pair of them pushing their Ford-powered cars to breaking point in front of the watching Ford executives.
The track changed with the times, the original layout being something of an olde-F1 classic mix of massive straights and barely any corners, before the layout changed to a more demanding 3.4 mile layout in 1971. For an American raceway, Watkins Glen was also improbably quirky, with the green flag to start the race and the checkered flag to end it being waved with hyperactive bouncing aplomb by the cigar-chomping form of "Tex" Hopkins, a considerably more memorable event than Charlie Whiting dismissively pressing a button on a starting gantry, I'm sure you'll agree.
Alas, The Glen was a victim of F1's inexorable technical progress. As Formula One cars got quicker, so they outgrew the ramshackle confines of the track, often with grisly results. Higly-rated Frenchman François Cevert was killed in a horrific practice crash at the 1973 race after losing control of his Tyrrell at the notoriously difficult Esses section, a crash so violent and senseless that it convinced Cevert's world-weary team mate Jackie Stewart to end his career one race early, sitting out the grand prix and retiring from the sport. A year later, poor Helmut Koinigg suffered an even more undignified death when he left the track and was decapitated after running underneath a poorly-secured Armco barrier.
Somehow, despite these horrors, The Glen remained on the calendar for another six years, and by the end of its time on the F1 schedule, had become a pant-soilingly scary place to drive. Unable to handle the stiff-and-speedy ground effect-era Formula One cars, however, F1's annual trip to Watkins Glen became increasingly anachronistic. By the time Alan Jones took victory in his Williams in the 1980 race, the runoff areas looked suicidally shallow, the track surface was a hair-raising bumpy mess and crowd numbers had dwindled badly. Underlining the safety concerns, Alain Prost missed the race after injuring himself in a practice crash in his McLaren. In early 1981, after the track failed to pay $800,000 of fees to the teams, it was dropped from the calendar, never to return.
Formula One soldiered on in the United States at a series of increasingly dull and forgettable street tracks, providing none of the high-speed thrill that had attracted the American fans to watch them in the first place. Tracks in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Detroit and an inconceivably rubbish event in Dallas, featuring Larry Hagman waving the green flag and a track surface that simply melted in the extreme heat, came and went with barely a shrug of interest. Even the sport's most recent foray on American soil, at the most hallowed of American motorsport grounds, the Brickyard, never really seemed to attract anything more than curiosity from the vast amount of the public.
Perhaps, in a way, it is best that F1 will probably never return to The Glen. After all, for the modern Formula One circus to darken the doors of the track now, wholesale changes to the layout and facilities would be required simply to make the circuit F1-spec, and the exercise would probably sap any semblance of history from the venue any replace it with a horribly sanitised insult to the track's past. Like trying to remake The Godfather under a PG certificate, with James Corden in the lead role.
So now it seems we're off to a Tilkedrome, in the middle of Austin, Texas. And while it would be wantonly fatuous to dismiss the track before the designs have even been published, it is possible to say with some certainty that it won't be a patch on The Glen. Unless maybe they get Charlie Whiting to jump around a bit before he presses that button.
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