Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALAN WILZIG: So here, down at turn two, flat--
turn three, rather, no camber.
Down the back straightaway and then on to the banking, which
we do like the Marino corner, which is to
say the first third.
You're on the upper lane, the middle third, you're in the
middle lane, and your exit, you apex and come down to the
very bottom.
Here, named after my driving coach, Erik Madsen, of the
last five years, we call the Madsen chicane.
This originally was not supposed to be here, but we
realized if somebody were to overcook this turn, they could
re-enter the circuit in a very unceremonious way and have a
head-on collision with another vehicle coming around.
So we put that chicane there, so if somebody blows it, they
just end up in the gravel traps.
Yeah, those tires still aren't up to temp,
but that's all right.
And that puts us at 100 miles an hour, which is an
incredibly fun thing to be able to do like in your
jammies on a Saturday morning before jumping in the pool
with the kids.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's 40 feet wide all the way around.
Obviously, the length matters if you're measuring from the
inside or the outside.
If you measure from the inside, it's a mile from the
middle of the track.
It's about 1.05 miles, and from the
outside, about 1.15 miles.
While this building is admittedly massive, we built
it on the lowest point of the property so that when you look
at it from elsewhere, you're always looking down onto it.
It's not looming above you like a Lexus dealership.
Nothing against Lexus dealerships, but I wouldn't
want to live 50 feet from one.
I refer to this variously, the museum building, the
collection building, the shop building, because Pete's race
shop is here.
PETER HUBER: My name's Peter Huber.
I'm the motorsports director for WRM, also the crew chief
for Wilzig Racing.
ALAN WILZIG: This is where no one's ever actually been taken
for a tour.
This is the pole barn.
This belongs to my wife.
She is super fast on it.
As she is remarkably fast on that Arctic Cat F7 snowmobile
in the middle.
There's also the red barn here, which serves as both a
guest house, the garage, and the entertainment center for
the yellow house itself, where my family and I live when
we're up here, weekends, summer, holidays, et cetera.
You know people always ask, how did you know which farm
you wanted to buy or which property.
And it was definitely being in this particular spot that I
thought to myself, wow, man, I can't believe that we're less
than two hours from midtown Manhattan, and I feel like I'm
in Wyoming.
This is just one of those views that if I didn't take
you, you probably wouldn't find.
For some reason, when we stop here, less so on a cloudy day
at lunch time, more so when the sun is setting over those
mountains, and you don't have the lawn mower in the
foreground, that it looks just really wild.
You feel like you could be in the Serengeti.
You could be almost any wild and woolly place on earth.
My inspiration for this whole project, which is Race Resort
Ascari near Marbella, Spain, being there was the first time
that I had seen a racetrack that was
just asphalt and grass.
It was completely barrier-free as if it had organically just
grown up from the soil and just wanted to be a racetrack.
And it was literally, for a motor sports fanatic who also
appreciates the beauty of nature, it was the singular
most magnificent thing that I could ever imagine.
Immediately, I decided I'm going to do the Northeast US,
New York equivalent, and really show everyone from the
dyed in the wool enthusiast like myself to people that
don't necessarily even like motorsport, A, that it can
exist in harmony with nature, and, B, that it doesn't have
to look like LaGuardia Airport.
No offense to LaGuardia in particular.
All airports are ugly.
PETER HUBER: I met Allen when he came into a motorsports
dealership that I was working at.
I was running the place at the time.
And he came in with his orange Range Rover, all outfitted to
the T, and told me he was going to build a racetrack,
which I have heard probably about 100 times at that point.
Motor cross tracks are one thing, and a lot of people can
build them in their fields and just for themselves and not
really open it up to even other friends and stuff.
It's mostly just for themselves and their kids.
But when you say a road race sporting track, then that's
even more of a yeah, OK, sure you are.
ALAN WILZIG: Some thought it was madness for me to want to
build a private circuit in my backyard.
Some people thought it was madness for me to continue in
the face of an activist group that was willing to spend an
endless amount of time and money to derail my dreams and
to prevent me from doing it.
Probably cut down hundreds of trees and such and such.
It was total ***.
It was a cornfield for 40 years.
When I bought it, it was 54 acres of corn stubble.
I didn't cut down one tree to make that racetrack.
They were saying that he can't use his track unless he has
this big building to store all his stuff in and vice versa,
vice versa.
And it was ridiculous, because it's a 300-acre property.
So while yes, it's large in that it's a 15,000-square foot
building, as our building inspector for the town
testified, he calculated I could build like 210 of these
buildings, let alone build the one of them.
PETER HUBER: Everybody's got dreams of yeah, I want to do
this and do that when they build their house and such.
But it never actually comes to pass.
Whereas, Alan, he did it.
And much to my surprise as well as pretty
much everybody else.
ALAN WILZIG: The truth is you could own 100 motorcycles,
you've only got one ***, and so you're only going to ride
one at a time.
You have two or three friends that are going
to ride with you.
So you're going to ride three at a time.
But whether you're fortunate enough or ambitious enough to
want to collect 100, or whether you have three is
really academic.
I have the very first motorcycles
that I've ever owned.
And that's a strange thing in the motorcycle world.
Guys spend decades, once they become bona fide collectors,
trying to find that first motorcycle, because they want
that one, that original Honda, whatever, that started their
whole 40-year passion for motorcycles.
They become obsessed with trying to find that one.
And it's like, good luck, because motorcycles, most of
the time, as I've said before, are consumable items.
My whole motorsports passion is driven since I'm 15 years
old by two things.
There was no sports in my family growing up.
My father was a Holocaust survivor and believed--
his education stopped when he was 13 years old and started
doing forced labor.
And then at 16 actually went into the concentration camps,
where he lost almost his entire family.
And so for him, he just believed you should just
devote your effort to school and then to work and just
improve yourself and your position and your place in
life through those two things.
And that left very little time for play, especially when you
take family into consideration, and virtually
no time for sport.
He considered a moment spent watching a football game worth
three neurons in your brain spent remembering who won the
1962 World Series as the biggest waste of
brain power or energy.
I don't mean to offend baseball fans or single out
any sport in particular.
I had to find my own sports and things to pursue and to be
intrigued by and my own heroes to follow and to emulate and
to be impressed with.
And the two things that I focused on were what used to
be called the Paris to Dakar Rally and the 24 Hours of Le
Mans, which, after the Dakar Rally, was pretty much the
second deadliest thing that somebody
could do for 24 hours.
Really, the zenith of Le Mans glory was when I was a kid,
during the 1970s.
There was no chicanes that were put onto the Mulsanne
Straight, and those cars would hit 240, 245 miles an hour on
the back straights.
We're not talking about dragsters.
We're talking about road racing cars that are very much
designed to turn left and right, but in a straight line
were able to go nearly 250 miles an hour and did so lap
after lap for 24 hours, from flag to flag,
they're going all out.
That's why that's continued to be an inspiration for me that
I can talk to you about how cool Le Mans was as a
15-year-old, when my eyes were opening up to the world of
everything automotive and racing and cars, and
adulthood, et cetera.
But it's just as cool today, because things have continued
to advance.
Fortunately, the safety has advanced
tremendously, as we all know.
And so that makes it something that has also kept the allure,
because it could have been just as glamorous, just as
fast, just as exciting.
But if it was just as dangerous, then as a father of
two young kids, my goal wouldn't be to
be doing it in 2014.
And it wouldn't be what all of my racing last year, this
year, and next year will be leading up to and preparing
myself for, which in fact it all is.
PETER HUBER: Safety is the biggest concern.
I'm less lenient than most regular tracks.
So if somebody gets a little crazy, whereas they think,
well, it's just down the track.
Sorry, you're done.
Unfortunately, I hate to be that guy, because it ruins the
weekend for some people.
ALAN WILZIG: I constantly have to remind guests, particularly
multiple visit guests, you have to be careful.
It's just as dangerous as a regular racetrack, even though
it is at my home.
Please don't force me to make it ugly by putting 100
barriers between you and the fun.
Let's just leave the nice horse fence there and one gate
and respect the gate.
So you see "Safety Team" here, and it's nice
as words on a truck.
But it's not for my insurance company, and it's not for
looking cool, which is half of what the safety car is exactly
for, just having fun and looking cool and having
flashing lights.
So this obviously serves nothing but practical terms.
But just taking it out, I've realized, and having it on pit
lane just serves as a reminder, whether we're
playing with the car, it's whether we're doing whatever,
that almost everything we do for fun can kill you.
I don't think of myself, of course, as a fatalist.
I love my two young children and hope to be around until
I'm a very old man, hanging out with them and spending
time with them and nurturing them and loving them.
But by the same token, my love of motorsports is so inbred
through me that I never liked the expression when
I would hear it--
always used, unfortunately, in a moment of sadness or
morbidity--
when they would say, oh, he died doing what he loved,
talking about a motorcycle racer, a pilot, whatever.
And you'd look and say-- or I would, coming from my
experience of an Auschwitz survivor father, whose whole
family was murdered just because of what religion they
were, then I'd say what kind of BS is that?
He died doing what he loved?
I'm sure his wife, his children, his parents loved
him as much or more as he loved flying that experimental
ultralight airplane.
So why come up with--
who's supposed to feel better by that "he died doing what he
loves" crap?
And then I realized, well, what if that was me?
And of all the things I do, it's very easy to look at that
phrase in a pejorative way and look down on it.
I realize that motorsports and the passion that I have for
them, and the reward that I derive from them, is so great
that if something unforeseen were to happen to me in the
pursuit of one of those things.
I would never want someone to say, oh, he died
doing what he loved.
That expression that drove him crazy, but rather, he died
being who he is.
And my wife always has the funniest line when people say,
well don't you worry about your husband, the fact that
he's racing, when he's not racing, he's racing in his own
backyard, he's doing whatever.
And she says, no, not really.
I know that when Alan is doing these things, they have his
full attention.
And when they have his full attention, he's going to be
probably the safest he is all year.
Because if left to his own device, he's going to be
walking across a street in Manhattan with his head down,
texting, and get hit by a bus.
I joke that all of this is the result of my dear late father
not buying me a Yamaha YZ80 minibike when I so desperately
wanted one as a 12-year-old growing up in
Clifton, New Jersey.
He'd always sort of pat me on the shoulder and say, son, one
day we'll have a farm in Pennsylvania, and you'll be
able to have all the dirt bikes you want.
But of course, as I say, he was all work, no play.
And so this farm in Columbia County, New York is in essence
taking the place of that promised but never delivered
figurative farm in Pennsylvania.
I'm going to try not to scratch at it, but you may
notice that I've got a nice welt forming from a little
mosquito bite that we just picked up on our
ride through the woods.
It's funny that for someone who spends as much time
talking and referencing racing that we go through my whole
compound, and you hardly see a race car.
But the race cars that are my current cars that are really
used aren't used here.
They're used either in IMSA competition throughout a whole
season or in other places selectively
for testing and things.
And as a result, seeing just some body work and things is
about as much, usually, except for the winter break, is as
much of a race car is as you'll see here
at any given moment.
So this turn is called the Marino hairpin.
It's not named after a famous Italian race car driver.
It is named after a famously good neighbor of mine, Dennis
Marino, whose property lies closest to this corner.
He was the first contiguous neighbor that signed an
affidavit of support when I applied to get permits to
build this track.
I like a good vertical departure.
We've had, from the time we started construction here,
we've had interlopers that have just
been 17-year-old kids.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're loyal Jalopnik fans
and viewers and audience, because it instilled a passion
in some people, including in some 17-year-olds.
One particularly unwise one, who just took it upon himself
to have to come here and really see whether everything
that he was seeing in the local papers and stuff was
true and just thought that perhaps the place was an empty
construction site and realized quickly that was not the case.
It's chainsaw bear over your right shoulder.
That's how we measure how tall our children are getting.
Peter's funny.
I've forced him to get so into cars over the last six years
as I've just gone crazy with car racing and everything
car-related.
And the poor guy just loves motorcycles.
PETER HUBER: When Allen hired me, I specifically told him I
do not want to work on cars.
I know that you have some cars here, and I don't want
anything to do with them.
And his response was, no problem.
Most of them are just the street cars, and they go right
to the dealer.
Great.
Perfect.
And from there on out, it took, I think it was about a
year and a half or so, and he sent an email and said, hey,
I'm going to buy this.
And it was a picture of a race car.
I said, who are you going to have work on that?
And he says, it's got a motorcycle motor in it, so
it'll be great.
You'll be able to do fine on it.
So from there on out, I now work on cars.
ALAN WILZIG: Whoa.
Geese crossing.
Lots of babies.
Lots of hissing.
Yeah, I get it.
I get it.
All right.
Don't be scared.
Yes, yes, yes.
We know who the guard goose is.
Totally get it.