Willow Springs is a wild old-school ride | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

And now, as I write this on Friday morning hoping the fine fellows at Goodwood will forgive me for being late with my copy again, I have an impressive temperature, my body feels like it’s been through a mangle and my head appears on the point of exploding. And the only good news is that testing has revealed it’s not what you think. In fact it’s what happens when your immune system clocks off for the best part of two years and is then suddenly assaulted by all those foreign agents and free radicals that tend to roam around the hollow metal tube in which you’ve just elected to spend a dozen hours with 400 other people at 35,000 feet. Frankly I think it would have been more surprising if I hadn’t brought something back with me.

Why this now? First because I’m a bloke sitting alone in his shed suffering from man flu with no one feel sorry for me because the missus has gone to work. Second, and more pertinently and in the absence of anything else going on in my life, I want to talk to you about American race tracks in general and one in particular.

We are in the UK blessed with some amazing circuits, none more deserving of the adjective than that for whom I am writing these words. But there is a certain kind of track in North America you just don’t get anywhere else. These are circuits built on a grand scale, making full use of local topography and almost none of the safety features required to allow racing at the top level. And, like Goodwood yet unlike almost all others, they have evolved hardly at all over the decades. To this day tracks like Road Atlanta, Watkins Glen and, perhaps most of all, Road America, are definitively ‘old school’ circuits and you only have to look at any one of the many onboard videos of cars racing around them to know how utterly thrilling they must be when it’s all going right, and equally terrifying when it is not.

But the one I visited is a lesser known track called Willow Springs, lesser known because apart from five NASCAR rounds, two in the 1950s, three in the 1980s, it has never been host to serious, professional motorsport. Instead it is beloved by amateurs who come here in their home-prepped cars to take on the unique challenge it presents.

And ‘Big Willow’ as it is known out there in the desert north of Los Angeles really is unlike anywhere else I’ve been. Its single claim to fame is to be the oldest permanent road course (as opposed to an oval like Indianapolis) in the United States. Work started there in 1952, stopped in 1953 and has yet to resume. So just as Goodwood is probably the only place in Europe where you can get a proper flavour of what racing was really like 70 years ago, so in the US is that service provided by Willow Springs.

It is an awesome place, half plunging up and down the hill into which it has been cut, the other a near flat out blind back to the start. At the exit of the slowest corners there is a single strip of ancient barrier, elsewhere there is literally nothing between you and countryside. Here the turns are ‘Castrol Corner’, ‘Rabbit’s Ear’, ‘Budweiser Balcony’, ‘Monroe Ridge’, ‘Wing’s Leg’ and ‘The Sweeper’.

I want to talk just a little more about the last of these. In a fast and well sorted road car you turn in flat at better than 100mph and then just ride it out as the forces build. But all the while you’re on the limit at three figure speeds, you’re aware The Sweeper melds seamlessly into what is only known as ‘Turn Nine’, the most boring name for the least boring corner you could ever imagine. Turn Nine is immensely fast, but not quite as fast as The Sweeper, so you have to take your fully loaded car and somehow persuade it to shed some speed without becoming unstable.

And then if you turn in where it seems normal and natural to do so you’ll be making a mistake from which there is no recovery. Because you’ll run out of room at the exit and find yourself quite literally skating and spinning your way across the Mojave Desert if, that is, your car has stayed right side up, and thanks to the substantial drop between track and desert floor, not even that’s a given. When it goes right, it’s as much fun as you can have in a car. When it doesn’t? Well I’ve been spared that treat so far. I guess as you reversed into the wilderness at gigantic speed you could at least console yourself with the knowledge that there’s not much to hit out there…