[Walt Fricke]

Well, trees are fine around a race track, but only if 100 yards or more away, with triple height Armco or better keeping you from hitting one. Race tracks built in a desert or other treeless area have a distinct advantage when it comes to customer safety, and avoid a huge cost. Armco is not cheap, and because you need it to be three pieces high unless you don't want anyone racing motorcycles on your track, it becomes even more expensive.

People like Watkins Glen, because it is a great facility. But in most parts it is a bit more like a city street course in terms of being unforgiving of offs. As Alan Wilson put it, people who bend their cars because of mistakes are less inclined to keep coming back.

This is unabashedly an amateur/club track. Especially during the learning phase, having obstacles as far from the pavement as possible is a huge plus. The only accidental DE death I am aware of happened when the car went off track and broadsided a tree, leading to the death of the instructor who was in the passenger seat. Such things are bad for business, to say the least.

This is not a knock on the track owners/designers. They had to locate land which was large enough, which they could afford, which was close enough to population centers, and for which they could have a reasonable likelihood of getting governmental approval. Not surprising that in their area there were a lot of trees. Like Calabougie.

Installing the safety features will be a big job. At my 2.5 mile home track, volunteers bolted 15,000 brand new slashed and discarded tires together into unit stacks, to protect concrete barriers which are, in most instances, so far from the pavement that in most areas no one has come close to hitting them in three years of operation.

You can be sure the owners have plans for all this. SCCA, for instance, will not sanction events at a track until it has been approved by the folks they have inspect tracks. Their insuror will also have a keen interest in this, and it has a distinct influence on rates.