Mapping current and historic motor racing venues in OpenStreetMap and OpenHistoricalMap. How to do it, what are the issues, and ways of displaying the data once it's entered.

1. Mapping Motor Sports Venues
Past & Present
Indianapolis 500, 1911

2. • 7/22/1894 - Paris to Rouen
• 11/28/1895 - Chicago->Evanston->Chicago
• 9/7/1896 - Narragansett Park, Rhode Island
"Auto racing began 5 minutes
after the second car was built”
- Henry Ford
First two - public roads
Narragansett Park - first closed circuit, oval race. existing horse track

3. Winning Duryea from the 1895 Times-Herald Race
Thanksgiving day, snowed the night before
won at an average speed of 7 mph, 8 hours
winning car spent an hour in a blacksmith shop while J. Frank Duryea forged a replacement for a broken steering link
wikipedia page on this race is problematic

4. History & Taxonomy
• Road Courses
• originally on public roads
• largely moved to closed, “permanent”, road
courses in the early 50s
• airport courses
• kart specific variants
a series of accidents, some fatal, in the late 40s/early 50s triggered the move to closed circuits
heyday of airport courses in the US was the early-mid 1950s, when the SCCA ran many races on SAC bomber bases

5. Watkins Glen
haybales for crash barriers
terrible accident in 1951 on Franklin Street during the race

6. History & Taxonomy
• Oval tracks
• repurposed horse tracks
• late 1900s - purpose built
ovals start to appear
• Brooklands in the UK -
1907
• Indianapolis Motor
Speedway in the US - 1909
Mapquest OpenAerial
representing dual use in OHM needs relations
no relation type for horse tracks right now that i’m aware of

7. History & Taxonomy
• Oval tracks
• for a brief period - 1910s & 20s - board
tracks
• small ovals for karts & midgets
• “ovals” are not actually oval
locating board tracks can be a particular challenge

8. Polo Grounds
1/5 mile board oval 6/5/1948, 6/8/1948
1/4 mile dirt 1940-1942
1/4 mile paved 8/28/1958-9/12/1959

9. Fiat Lingott
• From wikipedia - uploaded by Dgtmedia - CC BY 3.0

10. Ingleside Track
San Francisco, horse track starting 1895
auto racing track 1900-1905, 1907-1911
became a housing development in 1912
now Urbano Drive

11. History & Taxonomy
• Drag strips
• post WWII
• paved - (1/8, 1/4, 1/2 mile,
1000 feet)
• sand drags (300 feet)
Mapquest OpenAerial
1000 feet - usually a 1/4 mile track that was shortened due to insufficient shutdown area
1/2 mile rare, but happened - Riverside International Raceway in Orange County CA 1960s
this example - Dragstrip at former Indianapolis Raceway Park, now Lucas Oil raceway

12. History & Taxonomy
• Drag strips
Mapquest OpenAerial
This example - Lebanon Valley Dragway (& Lebanon Valley Dragway)

13. History & Taxonomy
• Off road
• Motocross
• generally stable enough
to map
• Rally cross
• may not be stable
enough to map - needs
research
Mapquest OpenAerial
example - motocross track at Canyon Speedway, Peoria, Arizona

14. History & Taxonomy
• Multi purpose complexes
• combinations of ovals,
dragstrips, road courses
• complexes that include
separate facilities for
alternative motorsports
Mapquest OpenAerial
Example - IRP/Lucas Oil Raceway zoomed out a bit

15. History & Taxonomy
Bing Imagery
Miller Motorsports Park, Toole Utah

16. Tagging Race Tracks
• highway=raceway
• oneway=yes sometimes appropriate
• leisure=track is for non-motorized tracks
• if track is out of service, but traces are
visible, use the disused: namespace in
OSM (disused:highway=raceway)

17. Tagging Race Tracks
• relation type proposal - type=circuit
• valuable for multi configuration complexes
• in use, could use some elaboration
• start/finish variations
• circuit={road, oval, dragstrip}
circuit= would facilitate searching

18. Tagging Race Tracks
• type=circuit relation
• use forward/backward roles to indication
direction of ways
• can divide road course into segments and use
traditional names
• turns frequently have both names and
numbers - how to represent?
Lime Rock names:
no-name straight
west bend
the left-hander
big bend
the uphill (aka climbing turn)
the downhill (aka diving turn)

19. Tagging Race Tracks
• temporary circuits
• public roads or airports
• no well defined way to do this in OSM
• event data - really should use separate
non-OSM DB
• in OHM, just outline the circuit on top of the
OSM features and use standard tagging

20. Tagging Race Tracks
• Pit lanes
• generally hot areas - recommend
highway=raceway, name=Pit Lane
• Return roads of dragstrips
• not hot, recommend highway=service,
service=driveway, name=Return Road

21. Tagging Race Tracks
• Paddock space
• highway=service,
service={driveway,parking_aisle}
• amenity=parking
• access=permissive
• name=A Paddock (or whatever the name is)

22. Tagging Race Tracks
• If the boundary of the property can be
discerned (frequently possible)
• leisure=sport_centre, sport=motor
• name=Name of facility/track
• address, website, etc.

23. Open Historical Map
• Uses modified OSM stack
• Uses OSM tags, but with some subtle
modifications
• don’t use disused: tag space
• instead, depend on start_date and end_date
• Overpass recently installed
stuff in disused generally doesn’t render with current carto stylesheets
Overpass facilitates selective queries & mashups
Still debugging setup; don’t have automagic update in place yet
Simple temporal queries currently being considered for addition to Overpass

24. Open Historical Map
• Currently somewhat sparsely populated
• Potential to be locally densely populated
• Currently no good mechanism for direct
references to OSM objects

25. Watkins Glen
• 4 different courses since 1948
• 4 variations of current course
http://www.na-motorsports.com/test/Watkins.html
leaflet/jquery widget
because tagging is consistent, same overpass query can fetch both OHM and OSM racetrack data
also pulls years from start_date & end_date for the labels
need to use historic aerials or topos

26. Thompson Speedway
• 2 ovals (1 defunct, 1 current)
• 5 distinct road courses (1 current)
• 2 variations of current road course
http://www.na-motorsports.com/test/Thompson.html
site of first closed circuit road race in the US post WWII

27. St Johns Grand Prix
• Temporary course on airport runway
• St Johns Industrial Airpark, St Johns, Arizona
http://www.na-motorsports.com/test/StJohns.html
in this case, used hand drawn maps supplied by race promotor

28. Bee Line Dragway
• inactive dragstrip north of Mesa, Arizona
• in OSM,
• disused:highway=raceway
http://www.na-motorsports.com/test/BeeLine.html

29. Palmer Motorsports Park
• Brand spanking new
road course in south
central Massachusetts
• highway=construction
• construction=raceway

30. Open Tagging Issues
• Dates of operation can be more complex than
start_date & end_date
• New York State Fairgrounds 1 mile oval
• 9/10/1903, 1905, 9/18/1909-9/16/1911,
9/1919-9/01/1941, 1946, 9/10/1949-
present
bigger, open question of temporal representations within OHM

31. Open Tagging Issues
• interactions of surface with dates of operation
• Pine Bowl Speedway (Poestenkill NY)
• clay - 7/1/1950-1951
• paved - 1952-1963
• it is reported that for a short period, the
track was paved in the corners but not the
straights due to a lack of funding

32. Sources
• Various histories of old venues
• History of America’s Speedways
• National Speedway Directory
• fairly new Ghost Tracks category of books
• lots online
double check everything

33. Sources
• Local race historians
• Facebook (!?)
• Two groups devoted to old racing circuits
• Historic aerials & topo maps
Paul Norman’s github project to list historical image sources

34. Sources
note that for USGS topos, there appears to a standard width road which is narrower than a typical racetrack.
Johnston County Speedway, NC

35. Sources

36. Sources & Certainty
• Need to look at sources the same way any
good historian does
• Need confirmation
• primary vs secondary
• recollections of participants long afterwards
are secondary, not primary
• participants may have grudges/axes to grind

37. Sources & Certainty
• Commonly
reproduced map of
the 1895 Chicago
race
• Made 50 years after
the race
• Not a primary
source
map has a numeric key, but the keyed notes are hard to find
roads north of the river in downtown Chicago don’t line up well
currently trying to reconstruct the correct course, using 1893 Rand McNally map of Chicago and written accounts

38. Documentation
• Need to document why we put things into OHM
• Where do the dates and names come from?
• Where was the track traced from?
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/
Open_Historical_Map/Projects

39. Info
• OSM/OHM handle: nfgusedautoparts
• rwelty@averillpark.net
• Ghost Tracks code:
• github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/examples
• www.na-motorsports.com/test/