Lime Rock Park

Lime Rock Park

Road Racing Center of the East
Track layout
Location	Lakeville, Connecticut, USA
Time zone	UTC-5 (UTC-4 DST)
Owner	Skip Barber
Operator	Skip Barber
Broke ground	1955
Opened	1957
Major events	American Le Mans Series Northeast Grand Prix Rolex Sports Car Series Lime Rock Grand Prix
Surface	Asphalt
Length	1.50 mi (2.41 km)
Turns	7
Lap record	43.112 seconds (P. J. Jones, Eagle Mk. III-Toyota, 1993, GTP)
Lime Rock Park Race Track
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. Historic district
Area	325.2 acre
Built	1956
Architectural style	Other, Race track
Governing body	Private
NRHP Reference #	08001380[1]
Added to NRHP	October 16, 2009

Lime Rock Park is a natural-terrain motor-sport road-racing venue located in Lime Rock, Connecticut, United States, a hamlet in the town of Salisbury, Connecticut, in the state’s north-west corner. The track is owned by Skip Barber, a former race car driver who started the Skip Barber Racing School in 1975.

Track

For years the track was listed as being 1.53 miles in length—the story goes that right after it was built, somebody used the odometer in a Chevy to measure the track length—and 1.53 was taken as gospel. Following the 2008 reconstruction (see below), Lime Rock's operations people measured all four possible configurations, and as it turns out, each was 1.5-miles long, plus or minus a few hundred feet. The "classic" configuration is 7 turns, while the three optional layouts are 8, 9 and 10 turns, respectively.

History

Two years after the park first opened in 1957 the Lime Rock Protective Association, with support from the nearby Trinity Episcopal Church,^[2] took the park to Litchfield Superior Court in an effort to ban Sunday racing. The court issued a permanent injunction against Sunday racing and its decision was upheld by the Connecticut Supreme Court. Although park officials have expressed a desire to return to limited Sunday racing, the injunction stands to this day.^[3]

The track was also the home track of Paul Newman, who supported his own Newman-Haas team with Bob Sharp.^[4]

The Rolex Sports Car Series and American Le Mans Series used a configuration which included the chicane at turn five and West Bend.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lime Rock Park.

• Lime Rock Park website
• Skip Barber Racing School (Uses Macromedia Flash)

Coordinates: 41°55′40″N 73°23′01″W / 41.927688°N 73.383599°W / 41.927688; -73.383599

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