Autoblog Senior Editor Seyth Miersma drives a 2016 Cadillac CTS-V around the Elkhart Lake Road Race Circuit, home to some of the best road racing in America in the 1950s.
Transcript[ENGINE TURNS OVER, ENGINE REVS]
SEYTH MIERSMA: 10 years ago I was here in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin for the very first time ever to drive the legendary Road America race course. When I was here, I found out that there was actually a much older road circuit that ran around the lake. It's about 6 and 1/2 miles and they raced on it until road racing in America was effectively outlawed. Today I'm back in Wisconsin to take one more run at Road America. This time I'm going to do it in the 2016 Cadillac CTS-V with all 640 horsepower, 630 pound-feet of torque. It's going to be a blast. Sadly, I can't tell you anything about that right now. We're under embargo for driving impressions of the car until August 3. So you're going to have to wait. But, in the meantime, we thought it'd be fun to take you on a cruise around Elkhart Lake and show you the old Road America course.
So, unfortunately, you can't actually drive all of the road course as it existed in the early 1950s. You can see that we've got this lovely pedestrian walkway where the racetrack used to run along the lake. But, frankly, that's enough walking for me, so let's get back in the car.
So here we're picking up the track again where the pedestrian walkway ends. But, as you can see, it's not really a place where you can drive with a lot of spirit unless you want to risk hitting somebody in a golf cart or in a bathing suit. So we just drove by Wacker's Wend, which is an amazing name for a corner. It sounds a little bit like the punchline to an English schoolboy's joke. Now, who knows what the surfaces were like back in the '50s, but you can tell through some of these sections, if the road was even approximately the same, that they would have been pretty hairy and an awful lot of fun in a race car of the era. There's not a ton of elevation change where you are going up and down rather quickly, sometimes off camber. And if you go off anywhere, man, you're just on the road, you're in the ditch.
Here we're coming up towards the rise that the end of what's known as Schoolhouse Straight, which ends in a T junction too. So, again, I'm not exactly sure what the corner is like here, but we're talking about a straight that's maybe-- seems like close to a mile long. Even back in the '50s. You could have been hitting a real velocity by the time you got to this turn.
[TURN INDICATOR CLICKING]
[CAR ACCELERATING]
Just another real fast, sweeping turn at the end of that straight. I mean, for all the romanticism around racing on the roads, you can understand why they had to get rid of it. Not only were the spectators unguarded, but you could just lose control, fly off so easily. It had to have been amazing to watch, though. There are actually two Start/Finishes to the race course. They changed over the years. But we passed one of them now and the other one is right as we get into Elkhart Lake with the sign actually marking it.
[TURN INDICATOR CLICKING]
[CAR ACCELERATING]
So, unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to drive the [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]. But I-- every time I'm out here, I feel like I get a little taste of what that must be like. The same sort of country, it's a little less hilly, but essentially we're talking about farm country. And that, of course, is string together what we're able to on public roads. These days the Start/Finish is pretty anticlimactic. As I said, we're coming into town right now. So we've got a 25 mile per hour speed limit as we cross the checkered line.
[CAR APPROACHING]
[ENGINE TURNS OVER, ENGINE REVS]
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