Images courtesy RacingSportsCars.com.
For all but a couple of the last 66 years, the village of Watkins Glen, New York, at the southern end of Lake Seneca, has hosted some form of racing, whether it be among sports cars, drag cars, or stock cars. But that doesn’t mean it’s all taken place on one track or even in one place in that storied town. Indeed, Watkins Glen has gone through four major iterations since re-introducing road racing to America, an evolution we can explore in vintage maps of the track.
As Watkins Glen International notes in its own history, the track originated as a dream of Cameron Argetsinger’s, an Ohio law student and World War II veteran who learned how to drive on the roads around Watkins Glen when his family spent its summer vacations there. “His father taught him to drive at 12 on these rural byways, and he later relished driving as fast as minimum safety, liberally defined, permitted,” wrote Douglas Martin for the New York Times in Argetsinger’s 2008 obituary.
After the war, Argetsinger longed for a place to drive his MG TC fast, so during the 1947 winter holiday, he laid out a race course that used the roads in and to the west of Watkins Glen. The course would start and finish in front of the courthouse on Franklin Street (State Route 14/414), head north and then west on State Route 409 out toward Watkins Glen State Park, cut south across a stone bridge that crossed Glen Creek, and then back east again on State Route 329 toward town. The entire 6.6-mile course ran on public roads – both paved and unpaved – and even crossed the New York Central Railroad, but Argetsinger saw these not as insurmountable obstacles.
Watkins Glen course map from 1950.
Instead, he got an official sanction from the SCCA, convinced the railroad to close that section of track for the day, and persuaded the town to shut down the roads for the race. Then on October 2, 1948, he gathered 21 other drivers for the first Watkins Glen Grand Prix – really just a four-lap qualifying race followed by the eight-lap grand prix.
Watkins Glen course map from 1953.
The race continued to run the initial course through 1952. Though Sam Collier had died during the 1950 race, driver deaths were more or less accepted in racing at the time, especially with such high-powered cars as Cunninghams and Alfa Romeo 8C2900s participating; however, an accident that injured 12 spectators and killed one in 1952 brought an immediate halt to the use of the Watkins Glen road course. It also brought threats of an end to racing on state highways in New York and with them higher insurance premiums, forcing race organizers to find another course.
They didn’t have to go far. The town of Dix, which encompasses Watkins Glen, worked with race organizers including Argetsinger, George Weaver and Bill Milliken to set up a course on farm roads – a course that involved no state highways – at a site southwest of the original course. The 4.6-mile course ran along Baker Hill Road, Hedden Road, Bronson Hill Road, Wedgewood Road, and what is now Montour-Townsend Road and ditched the sweeping turns and organic bends of the original course for plenty of right-angle turns, one sharply acute-angle turn, and lots of long straightaways. Racing began on the second Watkins Glen course in 1953.
Watkins Glen course maps from 1959, 1960, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1969.
It didn’t last long there, though, and some have since described the second course as a temporary one. Criticized by the racers and still on public roads, it led Argetsinger and other race organizers to seek out a more permanent and dedicated location after the 1955 grand prix. They found it, essentially, right under their noses; 550 acres of farmland on the eastern half of the second course, adjacent to Bronson Hill Road and crossing Wedgewood Road. Shorter than the two previous courses at 2.3 miles, it came together with input from racers and Cornell engineering professors alike and incorporated sweeping turns, a few straightaways and a couple sharp turns. It opened in time for the 1956 grand prix and the next year played host to NASCAR for the first time.
For some reason, just about every map of this third course configuration shows the track with north to the bottom of the map, perhaps because when situated that way, it somewhat (if you squint hard) resembles the original course maps (which showed the track with north to the right). Go figure.
Watkins Glen course maps from 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1984, 1984, 1997, and 2010.
Then in 1971, a year after Argetsinger resigned from the track, it went through its most recent major reconfiguration. The biggest change, the addition of “the Boot,” added a number of turns to the southern end of the track, but the reconfiguration also made some changes to the northern end of the track, squaring off that segment and preserving the hard right turn but at the same time erasing the sweeper labeled Fast Bend in the third-generation maps in favor of expanded pit areas.
(As you can see above, maps of the fourth course configuration largely, but not entirely, flipped north back to the top of the map.)
The track has since changed hands a number of times – Corning Glass bought it and re-opened it following the track’s early 1980s bankruptcy (apparently the end result of the debt the track incurred in the 1971 reconfiguration) and later sold it to International Speedway Corporation, the track’s current owner. Yet it has remained largely unaltered, save for a chicane added to the back straightaway, just before the Chute Loop. Wedgewood Road within the track nowadays serves as the track’s midway, and some of the second course’s roads have since been eliminated or re-routed to accommodate the third and fourth course’s configurations.
Watkins Glen course map from 2012.
While racing has never returned to the original road course since 1952, participants in the annual festival at Watkins Glen have been able to take a few parade laps of the Argetsinger course with a police escort, about the closest anybody’s going to get to legally racing the streets of Watkins Glen these days.
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