Next season, the new Tilkedrome in Texas will hope to become the 77th venue to be used for F1 racing throughout the years. They'll also be hoping for more than one race at the track, which would be more than these tracks managed.
1) Circuito de Monsanto (1959 Portuguese Grand Prix)
The 1959 Formula One season was a curious-looking one, even by the hodge-podge standards of the average 1950s-era schedule. In total, three of the nine official championship races that season proved to be one-offs, and the schedule itself featured no Nordschleife, no Spa-Francorchamps and no Silverstone. Of the events that filled in for the 'regulars', one was at the Circuito de Monsanto, which had hosted two previous non-championship F1 races in 1954 and 1957, and proved to be a beautiful but unnervingly dangerous place to race.
The track itself wound its way through Monsanto Forest Park west of Lisbon, providing a stunning backdrop for the race. However, the fast speeds and the surroundings forced drivers to contend with a number of obstacles, including some rather low quality sections of track surface, and a set of tram tracks that ran across the track at one point, as well as a flat-out blast down a section of the Autostrada that bisected the park itself. Drivers also felt unhappy at the decision to line almost the entire length of the 5.4km track with flimsy hay bales.
The sole official F1 race at the track came during the continuing powershift years in the sport, from the front-engined monsters of the early years of F1 to the new rear-engined designs. And the weekend went to a rear-engined machine, with Stirling Moss dominating proceedings. He enjoyed a Vettel-esque drive from pole position to the race win, eventually finishing over a lap ahead of his nearest rival and helping to complete a 1-2-4 for Cooper-Climax.
A fourth identical car being campaigned by Jack Brabham was eliminated from proceedings in a scary accident for the Australian driver midway through the race, when he spun out taking avoiding action against hapless local driver Mario Cabral. Brabham's car hit one of the maligned hay bales and then struck a telegraph pole, throwing the driver clear of the wreck. He mercifully survived uninjured, despite nearly being hit by second placed Cooper driver Masten Gregory while he lay prone on the track. That crash was enough to ensure that F1 never returned to the Monsanto track in any capacity, showing that perhaps even back in the 1950s, there was still some concession to driver safety at some level.
Highlights of the 1959 Portuguese Grand Prix can be found here.
2) Casablanca (1958 Moroccan Grand Prix)
In 1958, Formula One visited Morocco for their first ever full championship race in Casablanca, following a successful non-championship event there the year before, hoping to make the North African city a regular venue on the schedule. But, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine, this was not to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The Ain-Diab Circuit was constructed in double-quick time, taking just six weeks for workers to map out the route along the city's main coastal road and the main road from the city to Azemmour. These days, you can still easily see the track layout on Google Maps, while also noting that some enterprising young businessman has built a KFC near the braking point for turn one, a mere 45 years too early for the advent of Juan Pablo Montoya.
The 1958 race itself was phenomenally well-supported, with some 25 cars turning up for the race which represented the championship showdown between Stirling Moss and Mike Hawthorn. Although Moss took the lead from Hawthorn's pole-sitting Ferrari, and went on to win by over a minute, Hawthorn hung on for the second place he needed to take the championship, and become the first-ever British-sourced F1 champion.
But despite the drama of the race itself, the Casablanca track was the source of grim tragedy, with young Vanwall driver Stuart Lewis-Evans (Moss's team mate), killed in a fiery crash in the final stages of the event. The result led to the Vanwall squad withdrawing from motorsport at the end of the season, and contributed to the fact that F1 never returned to the Casablancan circuit.
Brief highlights of the 1958 Moroccan GP are available here.
3) AVUS (1959 German Grand Prix)
Another one-off event from the 1959 season that sneaks onto the list via a technicality. In fact, the maliciously-bonkers Automobil-Verkehrs- und Übungs-Straße had already hosted a whole range of F1 races since opening in 1921, but the 1959 race was the only time that the daft, and alarmingly dangerous, AVUS circuit played host to an official F1 event.
The circuit itself was gruesomely simple, comprising of two parallel lanes of a dual carriageway linked together by hairpin corners at each end, including the death-defying banked Nordschleife turn, dubbed the 'Wall of Death'. It was essentially a hideously distorted super-speedway on some pretty serious narcotics, with the layout having ranged up to as much as 19km in length.
Mercifully, by the time that it joined the F1 schedule officially, the southern hairpin (Sudschleife) had been moved further up the road, reducing the track distance to 8.3km. Not that the was any safer for it, and the Wall of Death had already claimed the life of Jean Behra in the Formula Two support race by the time the F1 event began. Owing to concerns about tyre strength over the course of the full GP distance, drivers agreed to run the race as two separate heats, with the times added together to declare a winner (It's not clear if Michelin ever pitched this idea at Indianapolis 2005).
The race itself saw Ferrari take a 1-2-3, with Tony Brooks leading hope American duo Dan Gurney and Phil Hill, but the circuit had not left a particularly good impression on the F1 fraternity, and the sport quickly returned to the equally dangerous (albeit for quite different reasons) Nurburgring. AVUS itself was partially sanitised after the north chicane was flattened, and national racing continued at the track until 1999. But it still claimed lives, and was finally shut for good in 2000. The old control tower for the track, at the old north hairpin, is now a random motel, and the rest has just gone back to being a dual carriageway.
Brief highlights of the 1959 race at AVUS are here.
4) Zeltweg (1964 Austrian Grand Prix)
The Austrian Grand Prix has, with only a single exception, been the responsibility of the mighty Osterreichring, and latterly the A1-emblazoned stunted version of the Osterreichring. But that one exception came when the race first appeared on the official F1 schedule back in 1964, and the Austrian Grand Prix took place on a track quite different from the sweeping, undulating mountains of Styria.
Instead, the 1964 Austrian GP saw the F1 crowd battle it out around a simplified circuit designed around a local airfield in Zeltweg. In fact, to call it simplified was an insult to the concept of the reductive process. The basic, L-shaped formation (again marked out with little more than hay bales) around the bumpy and poorly-surfaced airstrip was, however, an example that the simplest solution is not always the best.
Throughout the 1964 race meeting, driver suffered on the bumpy surface, with the whole weekend blighted by a series of suspension failures caused by the track, and the race itself proved to be little more than a battle of attrition, as favourite after favourite fell by the wayside, leaving one of Enzo Ferrari's favourite sons, Lorenzo Bandini, to take his sole GP win for the scarlet team.
Despite the madcap excitement, the track itself was not particularly loved by drivers (for obvious reasons), though their chiropractors may well have been glad to be kept in business in the aftermath of the spine-jarring weekend. When the Austrian leg of the Formula One tour returned in the 1970 season, they had relocated to the original Osterreichring layout. Although sportscar racing kept the Zeltweg Airfield busy for the next few seasons, the track was abandoned after 1969.
5) Donington Park (1993 European Grand Prix)
There are plenty of Formula One races down the years that will forever be burned into the collective consciousness for one reason or another. And while Donington Park has only ever been able to host a single race, they can be sure that their moment in the spotlight will never drop far from the front page of the history books, thanks to the sight of Fabrizio Barbazza scoring 50% of his career F1 points a staggering drive from Ayrton Senna.
It shouldn't really be necessary to describe in too much detail the events of April 11th 1993, with any self-respecting F1 fan already having that race, or the first lap of the race at least, forever burned into their retinas over the years. But Senna's win (one nearly as dominant as that of Moss at Monsanto, given that only one car finished on the lead lap along with the Brazilian come the end of the race) is the only bona-fide F1 action that has ever graced the Leicestershire track.
It wasn't an official British GP, more the track taking over the one-off hosting duties for the European Grand Prix, well before that race just became an excuse to give an extra race to Germany or Spain every year. And although F1 cars would never return, the sight of the field plunging through the Craner Curves, or racing down the Hanger Straight made for some memorable shots, especially given the miserable weather.
Of course, Donington might well have not made this list at all had a recent smash-and-grab raid on the British GP contract not ended in risible failure. The Donington Ventures company secured a 17-year deal for the race from Bernie Ecclestone from the 2010 season, announced plans for a significant overhaul of the track, and then promptly saw the whole thing collapse under an alarming lack of any actual financial backing. Still, we'll always have that lap...
Catch highlights of the 1993 Donington race, and count how many times the Williams drivers make a pit stop, here.
6) Le Mans (1967 French Grand Prix)
F1 at the Le Mans circuit is surely a combination to make motorsport enthusiasts weak at the knees, as the prospect of a roaring grid of F1 machinery negotiating the Mulsanne Straight and the Porsche Curves trickles into the imagination. Alas, the only time that F1 has ever visited the famous French circuit was to use the stunted and embarrassing 'Bugatti' layout of the track in 1967.
Aside from the pit straight and the Dunlop Curves, the Le Mans Bugatti track was an unrecognisable confluence of corners built on the famous track's infield, and thanks to a trademark pithy remark from Lotus driver Graham Hill during the course of the 1967 race weekend, can at least lay claim to being the origin of the phrase 'Mickey-Mouse circuit'.
The race itself was the usual 1967 fare of fast and fragile Lotus drivers giving best to their rivals, with reigning champion Jack Brabham leading home Denny Hulme in a 1-2 finish for his eponymous team, a result that cemented their early advantage in the championship. But F1 had not fallen for the Bugatti track, a mere 20,000 spectators (or around 2/3rds of an Istanbul Park in new money) turned up to watch the goings on and the French GP never returned there.
Although the track is still used today, primarily for motorcycle races (including the two-wheeled version of the 24 hour race), the track continues to struggle to prove itself as a genuine car-based option for racing in France. There was a certain amount of knowing raised eyebrows during the recent efforts to resurrect the French Grand Prix when even a dubious street track at Disneyland Paris was considered a more viable option than F1's inaugural Mickey Mouse track.
Watch footage of the 1967 French GP, parts of which can only really be described as full-on motorsport pornography, here.
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