Fast Times at Lime Rock Park

Idling on the left-side of the starting line in his silver 1961 Jaguar XKE, racer #61 Robert Hebert is focused on the grand marshall raising the green flag from a perch atop the pit entrance. Once the marshall’s elbow twitches, sending the go-signal slicing through the air toward the hot asphalt, Hebert and two-dozen other drivers in vintage Porsches, Mustangs, Corvettes, and Datsuns slam their gas pedals to the floor. Motors rev and tires screech, as clouds of exhaust fumes and the acrid scent of burning rubber fill the otherwise tranquil country atmosphere.

Seconds later, topping ninety miles per hour, Hebert closes in on Big Bend, the first crucial turn at Lime Rock Park, the world-class road-racing venue in Lakeville, Connecticut. Close on his tail is a longtime rival, racer #146 John Harden, in a cherry-red 1963 Huffaker Genie. With one eye on his dashboard gauges and the other on the apex of the sharp C-curve, Hebert slips ahead into the turn. He comes within six or so inches of his mark, clinching his spot as the man to beat in one of the final races of the 2009 Lime Rock Park Labor Day Vintage Festival. After fifteen adrenaline-fueled laps with competition growling fiercely behind him, Hebert speeds across the finish line to the sight of the almighty checkered flag swooshing madly through the air.

As soon as Hebert pulls off the course and into the paddock, where his crew from Donovan Motorcar Services in Lenox, Massachusetts, awaits, he leaps from his vehicle and tugs off his helmet to a chorus of cheers. His face is flushed a deep pink and he flashes a broad grin.

“When you can win a race at your home track—it’s the best!” gushes the seventy-five-year-old native of Monterey, Massachusetts, in breathless staccato. “I’ve been racing here for forty-one years; I’ve won over a hundred [races]….When I went by the hill, I got a standing ovation. I’ve never gotten that before. I’m home.”

Lime Rock Park, dubbed the Road Racing Center of the East, has been attracting world-class drivers from near and far since it was built by the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) on the site of a gravel pit in 1957. The 1.53-mile track—shaped, almost, like the wobbly outline of a hitchhiker’s fist—twists and turns through lush green hillside, upon which spectators roam, often settling down with lawn chairs and picnic baskets. Unlike the twenty-plus other major road-racing venues in the country, there are no grandstands, bleachers, or stadium seating. In their stead are grassy banks beneath giant trees and a pedestrian path alongside the perimeter of the black snake, upon which history has been made for decades.

Just last Tuesday, in fact, the 1939 Mercedes-Benz W 154 Silver Arrow [seen on the cover of this issue] rolled into Lime Rock Park to start its engine for the first time following a seventy-year hiatus.

The bullet-shaped model’s supercharged V-12, 500-horsepower engine had lain dormant since setting the fastest-lap record at the 1939 Yugoslavian Grand Prix, where it secured its status as “one of the most extraordinary racing cars the world has ever seen,” according to Lime Rock Historic Festival chairman Murray Smith. Trailered north from the prestigious Collier Collection in Naples, Florida, the $25 million baby was joined by two Mercedes engineers flown in from Germany, the United Kingdom-based vintage racecar engine specialist Dick Crossthwaite, and a gaggle of wide-eyed enthusiasts and journalists. Nobody could be certain that the vehicle would start, but after a few misfires and multiple spark-plug adjustments, Smith was able to coax it around the track from behind its big wooden steering wheel. The next weekend, the Silver Arrow became the showpiece of the Labor Day festivities, with automobile buffs posing for pictures and inspecting the meticulously polished chassis.

 This year, on September 3-6, three hundred cars in eight groups will race in the twenty-eighth annual Labor Day Historic Festival (the title modified recently to reflect the pastime’s significance) on Friday, Saturday, and Monday; racing is prohibited on Sunday thanks to a court injunction dating to 1959. Instead, the annual Sunday in the Park car show features hundreds of vehicles, each
detailed pristinely and parked alongside the speedway, sparkling like jewels in the late-summer sun.

This year’s “Gathering of the Clubs” spotlights models from the “Italian Empire”—Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Fiat, Maserati, Lancia, Lamborghini—and a roster of special events fills in the gaps, such as demonstrations of old Indy 500 track cars by collector Joe Freeman and a lectured exhibit by prominent motorsports photographer and longtime editor of Road & Track magazine John Lamm.

“Every year we do something different,” says Murray Smith via cellphone from the practice barracks of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France this past June, the oldest endurance race in the history of the sport. (It’s held on a circuit of closed public roads—as is the glamorous Monaco Grand Prix—and measures roughly eight miles, to test the reliability and fuel-efficiency of high-tech cars. Along with the Indy 500, these comprise what’s known as the Triple Crown of Motorsport.) It’s 6:20 p.m. overseas, and the tinny hum of engines can be heard just behind him.

“The Lime Rock event is with similar cars,” Smith says in his dry British brogue, referring to the American Le Mans Northeast Grand Prix on July 23 and 24. It’s the seventh year that Lime Rock has hosted the event, in which sophisticated Le Mans prototypes and GT models, known for cutting-edge and “green” technology, dazzle speed-freaks in a series of nail-biting challenges over two hours and forty-five minutes. In fact, some of the cars whizzing by Smith at this very moment in France will race at Lime Rock in July. “The American Le Mans attracts some of the fastest sports cars in the world—and people don’t realize that,” Smith says.

But they’re starting to. Lime Rock owner-operator John “Skip” Barber III likes to use the word renaissance. The sex appeal of a lightning-fast, shapely hunk of dazzling metal with a throaty roar has stood the test of time, yet the popularity of the sport in America has been relatively sluggish in comparison to other spectator favorites, such as baseball, football, and basketball. Mario Andretti, perhaps the most accomplished and recognized American in the sport, peaked in the seventies. Household names now—Dale Earnhardt Jr., Danica Patrick, Kurt and Kyle Busch [no relation to this writer]—are known primarily for their coups in NASCAR (stock car racing), which, though one of the most-watched professional sports on TV in the United States, doesn’t quite carry the prestige of road racing. Still, for the first year ever, Lime Rock’s Fourth of July event features the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour, superfast cars that have not raced on a road course for ten years. (Interestingly, stock car racing was born during Prohibition, as cars with trunks full of bootleg whiskey were modified to more swiftly evade police.)

“Most road racing, the kind we do, is done in Europe and South America,” notes Barber with a twinge of disappointment. “Look at Indianapolis [500]: a quarter of the racers are Brazilian. We don’t have an American superstar. It’s a huge problem that there aren’t more Americans at Indianapolis. But that’s changing....”

Barber, 72, has been linked inextricably to Lime Rock Park since he was a testosterone-fueled, twenty-something Harvard grad competing in the venue’s early races, going on to win three SCCA national championships in the 1960s, consecutive Formula Ford National Championships in 1969 and 1970, and racing in two Formula One World Championships in 1971 and 1972. (Formula cars, by the way, are single-seaters with an open cockpit.) Following a wildly successful career, he retired and founded the renowned Skip Barber Racing School in 1975. Today the school, which Barber sold in 1999, has branches at twenty tracks across the country, and, along with the Skip Barber Driving School and the Skip Barber Race Series, remains Lime Rock’s most prominent tenant.

“The great days of spectator racing at Lime Rock really reached their peak in the 1980s,” Barber says from the diminutive track office, a white, four-room shack on the outskirts of the property on Route 112. But then, “It went downhill for awhile, because of the races it had to put on.” In 1983, fearing the sale of Lime Rock to a group of New Jersey bankers, whose plans may have included a hotel and convention center, Barber, who then still owned the racing school, along with five fellow racers and a whole lot of help from the local bank, bought the track.

“We put a tremendous effort into slowly fixing it up,” Barber shares. He’s often quoted as saying that he wants Lime Rock to appear entirely green-and-black: fresh asphalt and lush meadow, with no muddy patches in between. The infield spectator area—the hill—is surrounded by pines, as are other areas throughout the 350-acre property. Myriad safety improvements and aesthetic and environmental revisions have been made over the years, most significantly the $5 million restructuring and paving of the entire track in 2008. The layout, however, has never changed.

 “Lime Rock has been the same racetrack for over fifty years,” asserts Lime Rock Park CEO Georgia Blades, noting its addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. “This is a place that is important to the history of the country, and the original footprint of Lime Rock [is] the same as when the first professional drivers raced here.”

Much to racers’ delight. “The track is so cool because it doesn’t have what we call ‘Mickey Mouse turns’—tiny, annoying turns where you lose momentum. Every turn is fast and demanding,” says sixty-six-year-old racing legend Sam Posey of Sharon, Connecticut.

Drastic elevation changes—a three-story rise over slightly more than four hundred feet at the track’s southernmost section, the Uphill, or turn number five; a six-story drop just before the last turn, number seven, the Downhill—pair with sharp crests and some wicked angles for an undulating series of surprises that can shock even diehard racers.

John Harden, 78, of Oklahoma City, that second-place finisher to Hebert at the 2009 Vintage Festival and a Lime Rock veteran for decades, calls it the “most fun track from a driving point of view.” Having raced every major circuit in the U.S.—from the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in California to the Daytona International Speedway in Florida to Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin—Harden explains: “It’s a very demanding track. You cannot let your attention diverge for a second. The downward straight gets up to a hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty miles per hour, then you slow down for Big Bend. The back side of the track is very technical—it’s got everything going for it, even though it’s a short track.” (Many others, he notes, run two to four miles in length.)

As Posey reveals, with a twinge of pride, “You get a rhythm to it, but in a sense you never get a rhythm, because you never get used to it. I think it’s the most challenging track east of the Mississippi.”

In 1967, at twenty-two-years-old, Posey was the first racer to break the minute-lap barrier at Lime Rock, in a winged Can-Am. He clocked the one-and-a-half miles at 58.6 seconds. “I just pulverized the lap record because nobody had the right car,” he says matter-of-factly. But the glory was short-lived. “Skip came along with a similar car and lowered my record later that summer,” Posey adds wistfully. “We had this background of being rivals, but in the nicest way.”

After years of competition, winning a Trans-Am race and two Formula 5000s in 1969, Posey earned his billing as a top local favorite. “Lime Rock has been really good to me,” he says. “There was a lot of extra pressure, though. It’s the home-court; you feel terrible if you lose in front of friends and family.”

Also an architect, painter, and writer, Posey was nabbed by Barber in 1998 to redesign some of the then-decrepit structures at the park, most notably a big old barn sagging dangerously close to the pits at the start-finish line.

“I considered lighthouses, air-control towers, churches with steeples, and train stations,” says Posey, who worked with his brother, architect David Moore, to design what is now the Michelin Tower, by far the most defining structure of the entire property. “We wanted something that fit the flow: long and narrow, parallel to the track, but with a tower rising out if it that says, This is the place.”

They broke ground on a bitterly cold December morning in 1998, so as to complete the project in time for spring races. As snow and ice succumbed to rising temperatures and as the Skip Barber Racing School revved up for another season, the carpenters working on the project became increasingly intrigued by the park’s mystique. So, naturally, Barber made sure they each got a ride. Several went on to become true-blue racers.

“That’s something Skip and I have seen eye-to-eye on,” Posey says, “It’s about the experience.”

Lime Rock Park is just that: a park, where spectators are encouraged to wander and explore. The state-of-the-art Midway is home to various fan activities, including the popular Big-Y Kid’s Club, featuring a bouncy house, a juggler, games, and souvenir packets (all kids age 12 and under are admitted to the park free). On race weekends, fans can roam the paddock, where teams park their transporters and set up makeshift garages during races, to observe mechanics up-close and chat with drivers. At 6 p.m., the paddocks and roadways are opened up to bicyclists.

That “The Star-Spangled Banner” is always performed by a live singer, not a broadcast recording, and Salisbury’s annual Fourth of July fireworks display erupts from here, further demonstrates the homey, small-town atmosphere of the historic track. To top it off, parking, along with camping, is always free.

“Memorial Day weekend is a camping weekend,” Barber mentions of the season-opener, which this year snagged the Grand-Am Rolex Series Daytona Prototypes for the first time ever, drawing the biggest crowd—20,000 strong—that weekend has seen in ten years. Tents and RVs speckled the property. “It was jammed with campers this year!” Barber proclaims. “You almost wonder what their main motivation is….”

Georgia Blades, formerly the executive vice president of the Skip Barber Racing School in the 1990s and CEO of Lime Rock since 2006, takes pride in the details. “I’m hoping to get more locally grown products in our concessions,” she says. “This is the direction: to be a place where the family can come and enjoy the day, get a healthy burger, and breathe clean air.”

She’s also passionate about nurturing the park’s natural beauty. “One of my greatest wins, if you will, was that we put in a whole new grass area on one side of the racetrack, and I had it seeded with wildflowers. I got a phone call from one of the racing drivers to say how fabulous it was. I thought, ‘Wow, the guys like it!’ Guys really care about this stuff, too.”

Of course, part of the atmosphere is that it is loud. Though Lime Rock Park has always followed strict noise limitations during its two-hundred-day season, measuring suspect vehicles with a decibel-meter, Barber is constantly working on reducing the racket. “We have asked people to be quieter, to do a better job muffling their cars,” he maintains. That being said, it’s a necessary evil. “The track’s been here fifty-four years,” Barber continues. “It doesn’t seem reasonable to move in and start complaining. And that’s all I’ll say.” He smiles politely.

Regardless of the ruckus, Lime Rock Park is a boon to the local economy. It’s tough to pinpoint the impact of the park’s four main events, as they occur on already-bustling summer weekends, three of which are major holidays—Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day. But the off-peak benefits are apparent, says Dan Bolognani, director of sales and marketing at the Interlaken Inn in Lakeville and chairman of the Northwestern Connecticut Convention & Visitors Bureau. Midweek racing in the summer and fall for the various sanctioned car clubs, the SCCA (which counts 75,000 active members in the U.S.), and the Skip Barber Racing School are especially important.

“These are people who typically spend the night or multiple nights here, eat in area restaurants, bring their families with them—they are true economic drivers,” Bolognani says, pun intended. He targets such clientele at the 1892 Interlaken, which comprises slightly more than half of the town’s entire room inventory.

“We provide ample parking for people who have extra cars; extra parking for tractor-trailer trucks; buckets, rags, and hoses for washing the cars—simple things, but these are basic amenities that auto-racing people need.”

And they keep returning to Lime Rock in droves: an estimated 100,000 people per year. “Business professionals, as well as people who are just true enthusiasts—it’s a hobby for them,” Blades says. “They might have a great car, a fast car, and they’re spending the day with people like themselves. Sometimes it’s not racing, it’s learning how to drive, or sometimes it’s driving cars to the max. This is a release valve for them.”

While admission prices for spectator events are reasonable—a four-day ticket to the Historic Festival is $80 if purchased in advance; to watch the SCCA New York region amateur meet-up in October, $10—driving a vehicle on the racetrack can set you back some. At the Skip Barber Racing School, driving instruction starts at about $1,000 per day; three-day racing training rings in at $4,000.

“Most of the people who come are novices,” Barber insists. “Some are really serious; others, it’s their Outward Bound experience.”

On a grassroots level are the twenty-five or so upscale enthusiast car clubs, each of which has sanctioned “club days” at Lime Rock, with members paying a fee of $150 to $400 to bring their own vehicles to the track (rentals are sometimes available). Up until 2008, Paul Newman often raced at Lime Rock as an amateur, even winning his first of four SCCA national titles in 1976.

Then there’s the Club at Lime Rock Park, which Barber inaugurated in 2008 to celebrate the newly revamped track. Oft-described as a country club for car racing enthusiasts, the members-only group touts itself as catering to “the highly sophisticated to the borderline outrageous” (see: a $110,000 initiation fee for equity and full memberships, plus monthly dues of $550; associate memberships run $27,500, plus $275 per month). The three-hundred members drive their own street-legal rigs—BMW, Porsche, Ferrari, Lotus, Ford, Chevrolet, Mazda, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Shelby, Audi, and Mini are common marques—over sixty-plus days of exclusive track time and enjoy on-site coaching and private social gatherings.

An insatiable addiction to fast cars—old or new, seen from behind the wheel or from afar on a grassy hillside—is why the masses return time and again to Lime Rock Park. Driver #146 John Harden anticipates his return to the Historic Festival in September, for the pastoral park ambiance and to see the friends he’s made here over the past twenty-five years. And for a rematch with #61 Robert Hebert.

“Racing is one of those rare things where you’re allowed to push your own personal envelope,” Harden explains. “Each time you’d like to push it a little further. A good race [is] where you don’t know ’til the checkered flag drops who’s gonna win. The fun is to have Bob Hebert there and try to catch him—or to have him try to catch me.” [AUGUST 2010]

Against all odds, Berkshire Living senior editor Amanda Rae Busch managed to avoid getting a single speeding ticket while researching this story.

THE GOODS

Lime Rock Park Historic Festival
September 3-6
Lime Rock Park
60 White Hollow Rd.
Lakeville, Conn.
860.435.5000