Mapping Motor Sports VenuesPast & Present

Indianapolis 500, 1911

• 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 roadsNarragansett Park - first closed circuit, oval race. existing horse track

Winning Duryea from the 1895 Times-Herald Race

Thanksgiving day, snowed the night beforewon at an average speed of 7 mph, 8 hourswinning car spent an hour in a blacksmith shop while J. Frank Duryea forged a replacement for a broken steering linkwikipedia page on this race is problematic

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 circuitsheyday of airport courses in the US was the early-mid 1950s, when the SCCA ran many races on SAC bomber bases

Watkins Glen

haybales for crash barriersterrible accident in 1951 on Franklin Street during the race

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

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

Polo Grounds

1/5 mile board oval 6/5/1948, 6/8/19481/4 mile dirt 1940-19421/4 mile paved 8/28/1958-9/12/1959

Fiat Lingott

• From wikipedia - uploaded by Dgtmedia - CC BY 3.0

Ingleside Track

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

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 area1/2 mile rare, but happened - Riverside International Raceway in Orange County CA 1960sthis example - Dragstrip at former Indianapolis Raceway Park, now Lucas Oil raceway

History & Taxonomy• Drag strips

Mapquest OpenAerial

This example - Lebanon Valley Dragway (& Lebanon Valley Dragway)

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

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

History & Taxonomy

Bing Imagery

Miller Motorsports Park, Toole Utah

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)

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

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 straightwest bendthe left-handerbig bendthe uphill (aka climbing turn)the downhill (aka diving turn)

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

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

Tagging Race Tracks• Paddock space

• highway=service, service={driveway,parking_aisle}

• amenity=parking

• access=permissive

• name=A Paddock (or whatever the name is)

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.

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 stylesheetsOverpass facilitates selective queries & mashups Still debugging setup; don’t have automagic update in place yetSimple temporal queries currently being considered for addition to Overpass

Open Historical Map

• Currently somewhat sparsely populated

• Potential to be locally densely populated

• Currently no good mechanism for direct references to OSM objects

Watkins Glen• 4 different courses since 1948

• 4 variations of current course

http://www.na-motorsports.com/test/Watkins.html

leaflet/jquery widgetbecause tagging is consistent, same overpass query can fetch both OHM and OSM racetrack dataalso pulls years from start_date & end_date for the labelsneed to use historic aerials or topos

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

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

Bee Line Dragway

• inactive dragstrip north of Mesa, Arizona

• in OSM,

• disused:highway=raceway

http://www.na-motorsports.com/test/BeeLine.html

Palmer Motorsports Park

• Brand spanking new road course in south central Massachusetts

• highway=construction

• construction=raceway

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Sources

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

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 findroads north of the river in downtown Chicago don’t line up wellcurrently trying to reconstruct the correct course, using 1893 Rand McNally map of Chicago and written accounts

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

Info• OSM/OHM handle: nfgusedautoparts

• rwelty@averillpark.net

• Ghost Tracks code:

• github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/examples

• www.na-motorsports.com/test/