Nelson Ledges, Racing Circuit

Nelson Ledges Road Course is a 2-mile, seven-turn paved circuit on a rural back road near Garrettsville, Ohio, east of Cleveland and Akron. It began as a dirt track in 1958 on a small farm owned by attorney Marvin Drucker and was paved in the early 1960s, when it measured just over a mile. Considered close to abandoned by the end of the 1960s, the track was revived under manager John McGill, who formed Mahoning Valley Motorsports and, with sponsorship from Gulf Oil, nearly doubled its length to two miles around 1970. The expanded layout added a banked looping corner leading to a long triple-apex right-hander known as The Carousel and a fast back straight with an infamous kink that could be taken at well over 100 mph, making it one of the fastest club circuits in America. Nelson Ledges pioneered several practices later adopted nationwide, most notably ringing the entire course with tyre walls, made from tens of thousands of cheap used tyres from Goodyear's nearby Akron plant. It became a hub for SCCA showroom-stock racing and, from 1980, home to the Longest Day of Nelson, a 24-hour endurance race that helped invent showroom-stock endurance competition; it also hosted Trans-Am rounds in the mid-1970s. After years of neglect cost it its SCCA certification in the late 1990s, the circuit passed to McGill's children in 2003 and, following Drucker's death, was bought by real estate investors Brian Ross and Brian Ross Jr. in 2015. Fresh investment, a repave and the return of ChampCar endurance racing in 2018 led to SCCA recertification in 2020 and a resurgence of club racing activity.