“Autodrome: The Lost Race Circuits of Europe”
By S.S. Collins and Gavin D. Ireland
Review by Gregg Leary

I love auto racing and history. My dad and grandma planted those seeds in me early. Gram took me to dirt track races in Pennsylvania and Ohio when I was in elementary school. My dad was a teacher and during our summer vacations we visited historic sites around the country…Gettysburg, Antietam, Harper’s Ferry, Drake’s Well, Fort Ticonderoga, the Henry Ford Museum, The Smithsonian. I don’t think we EVER passed a historical marker along the highway where he didn’t stop and have me read the information on it. “Dad, it’s dark outside! I can’t read the marker,” I complained. “I’ll put on the brights….there, now you can read it.” I probably didn’t appreciate his history lessons at the time but I find myself subjecting MY kids to the same technique on our family vacations.

“Autodrome” appeals to my love of history and auto racing. The authors give us a double dose of racing nostalgia. Collins writes poetically of the palaces of speed and Ireland documents them in his beautiful portraits

On the dust jacket, Collins writes, “Scattered around Europe are rings of crumbling tarmac which once played host to the high speed theatre of life and death that is motor racing. Abandoned grandstands and timing boxes wait patiently after a long-finished race; all now relics, full of ghosts of the past. Europe is littered with ‘lost circuits.’ This book is about these forgotten race tracks, and is dedicated to those who raced on them, worked on them, gave them their all, which, in some cases included their lives.”

“Maybe in a couple of thousand years archeologists will be puzzling over the purpose of these abandoned and forgotten circuits-much as they do today over the great stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury.”

Ireland says, “To climb the banking of Brooklands, or watch the evening sun fade on the Reims podium where Caracciola, Fangio and Clark once stood is to feel the very heartbeat of motor racing. (Ireland’s breathtaking portrait of Reims graces the cover.) I would encourage all who read this book to visit these monumental tracks before they disappear entirely, and support the efforts to preserve them.” Fortunately for the reader, Ireland’s photographs and Collins’ words not only preserve the memories of these famous racetracks but save the reader thousands of dollars in air fares. Reading “Autodrome” is the next best thing to being there.

“Autodrome” chronicles nine famous race tracks “in order of closure, from first to last.” The list includes:

1.  Brooklands
2.  Monza
3.  Reims
4.  Nurburgring Sudschleife
5.  Crystal Palace
6.  Keimola
7.  Masarykring
8.  Avus

9.  Linas Montlhery

“They all lived. The Autodromes were alive, each had a soul and each a personality. They brought joy to millions all around the world, love was discovered here, loves were lost, and sometimes so were lives. Perhaps too much was lost, the price just too high; whichever, the lifeblood that fuelled these great places slowly seeped away and lifeless corpses are all that remain. This book is not dedicated to any single person or place, but to those who lived with the circuits, those who died on them-and the tracks themselves.” Needless to say, Collins’ passionate prose leaps from the 176 pages of “Autodrome” as do Ireland’s gorgeous photographs.

The layout of the book is superb. Typically the history of the circuit is summarized and illustrated with vintage photographs, programs, posters and track diagrams. The “chapter” ends with contemporary images that reveal what the track looks like today. The contrasts are stunning and often very sad. Anyone who has seen the movie “Grand Prix” will instantly recognize the Monza banking in Ireland’s photographs. The rusting guardrail and graffiti on the tarmac in the contemporary photographs seems like sacrilege.

The Reims chapter is amazing. From a close up portrait of crumbling paint from a Shell sign to the long unused Total scoreboard atop the pits…we go macro…micro…zoom and telephoto. Ireland’s mastery of photographic technique delights the rods and cones of the viewer.

Historic tidbits abound in “Autodrome.”

Hugh Fortescue Locke-King attended the 1906 Targa Florio and later the French Grand Prix and noted that there were no British entries. He figured that the UK’s 20 MPH speed limit and the lack of a permanent testing/racing circuit was the reason. He built the world’s first purpose built motor circuit as a result…the 3.25 mile Brooklands in 1907. It predated Indianapolis by 2 years.

In 1945 a parade of Allied tanks damaged the surface of the Monza track. A year earlier tanks from the Battle of the Bulge destroyed the track surface at Spa-Francorchamps.

In the 1961 French Grand Prix at Reims, Giancarlo Baghetti won in his very first Formula One start. It is still the only time that has happened.

At Keimola near Helsinki, Finland on May 10, 1988 a driver in an illegal race on the abandoned circuit hit an elk that wandered onto the track…eerily similar to what happened to Cristiano da Matta who hit a deer on the Road America track this year.

The AVUS track in Germany is often considered the world’s first motorway. It was operated as a toll road before World War I. It is said that Hitler suggested the high banking (almost 41 feet high) so that Germany would have the fastest race course in the world. Hitler’s “wall of death” was completed in 1937 and AVUS WAS the fastest circuit in the world for almost 30 years.

Fascinating. “Autodrome” rates four out of five lug nuts.