This was where John and I spent most of our Sundays. Blackhawk Farms in those days was strictly private. Now, it is public. To gain entry then, you had to sign a liability waiver at the gate, and you had to be either a driver, part of a crew, a track official, or a worker. There were no concessions. People parked both themselves and their race cars in the middle of the track. The weekends started on Friday, and many of the workers camped in the middle of the track loop, as did almost all of the drivers and their crews. It was a lovely track.
We almost always worked corner #4. It was the best one on the track. The radius of corner #3 decreased the farther you drove into it (very nasty). Thus, the cars coming out of it were usually wound up pretty tight. They would then upshift, spin their tires, get up into their torque curve, and just roar into corner #3D going fast and in mid-gear at high revs. They would usually have to downshift right at the start of #3D, but then would upshift heading in to #4. The sounds and smells were just awesome.
It was especially interesting and exciting to see the A production Cobras and Corvettes in this corner, since they had such high torque engines even at low revs. They would just bellow coming through here, and sometimes even downshift right in the middle of the corner. The C production Porsches would enter and leave the corner in low gear at high revs and just wind up tighter and tighter going though it. They had an absolutely marvelous sound, and seldom lost control. The formula cars had the most trouble with this corner. We were always pushing some of them back out on the track. The Hanson Eagle chevy #44 A sports racer would just eat this corner alive, never shifting and never losing it. What a car!
Elkhart Lake (often called "Road America") was another track we worked, although not as often as Blackhawk Farms. Our corners here were at the top and bottom of the back straight. The top corner was #3, and the bottom #5. The top corner was a thrill, since the cars could get up quite a head of steam coming out of #1 and #2, still be in a low gear, and would be going at high revs slightly downhill into #3. There they would have to brake and do a sharp right, which usually meant a lot of overstear and fishtailling. More than one car in the corner at a time was pretty much a disaster except for the formula cars, which could stick to almost anything at any speed.
Corner #5 was an interesting one since it was at the bottom of a long downhill straight. Speeds were high, and cars would often enter the corner in pairs. The winner out of it was the one who braked and downshifted best coming into it. We pushed a lot of people out of the adjoining field. Sometimes when they knew that they couldn't make the corner, they would just drive straight off the track and wait for us. Hot tires made for some real spinouts on this corner as well.
Click on the track numbered turns for some nice car pix!