Friday 20 September 2019

Air Base Speedway

This is pretty cool. NASCAR, but still pretty cool.

A couple of weeks ago YouTuber S1apSh0es posted a video detailing his search for a "ghost track", a minor venue from the 1950s that had all but disappeared from the records. In local terms, imagine if it turned out one of the Bathurst Easter meetings hadn't been held at Mount Panorama after all, but on the old Vale Circuit instead. And then imagine it was completely forgotten about, because the race reports only mentioned "Bathurst" so the archivists just assumed it was the Mountain.

(And given you probably had no idea there was a second circuit at Bathurst before the Mount Panorama Scenic Drive went in, the comparison's kind of apt. I certainly had no idea the Vale Circuit was there until the old man and I fulfilled a promise to visit the National Motor Racing Museum, took in a looping doco on the area's rich motorcycle history, then got in the car to check it out ourselves.)


Anyway: pretty cool. As someone who also spends more time than they're proud of sifting through racing archives and old forum posts for clues to racing mysteries, I could definitely relate. Even so, I didn't think much of it until the second video went up. It seem the first had triggered one of the internet's finer crowdsourcing exercises, and the result was S1ap finding exactly what he was looking for.



That's some fine sleuthing, S1ap. Looking forward to video three, and whether the drone shots reveal anything. God knows a drone won't reveal much of Amaroo or Oran Park anymore (although Lowood's Mobilgas Hairpin is still fairly distinct if you know where to look. And Mount Druitt remains a complete mystery to me.)