The Glen: Most underrated 11 turns in auto racing

Climb the hill on County Road 16, go past the little ice cream hut and the parked snow plows at the New York State highway maintenance facility -- home to the best highway maintenance workers in the world, according to the sign outside -- and you might miss the racetrack completely if there weren't a sign there to stop you. Watkins Glen International isn't overwhelming. It's simple and rustic, like much of the countryside that surrounds it. Among the cornfields and waterfalls and the little lakeside towns, somehow this road course manages to fit in.

The track is 60 years old this season, as old as NASCAR itself, and in some places the age shows. For a sprawling road course, the Sprint Cup garage area is surprisingly tight. The garages are little more than sheds. The frontstretch grandstand at Watkins Glen is a hand-me-down, trucked over from its now-closed sister facility in Nazareth, Pa. While the track has made several capital improvements in recent years -- such as repaving, addition of showers in the campground, and a new media center that looks like a ski chalet -- the amenities there will never be confused with those at Texas. Or Bristol. Or even Darlington.

It looks exactly like what it is, a rural road course that was built a little at a time, and fell into bankruptcy and disrepair for a time in the 1980s. And that is unfortunate, because the less-than-stunning visual presentation obscures something much deeper, and much more significant -- the fact that Watkins Glen, with its baby blue guardrails and long, fast layout, is on a very short list of the greatest racetracks in America. Actually, it's not a list, but an elite triumvirate: Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Daytona International Speedway, and the austere road course in New York State known as the Glen.

Stunning? Not really, when you consider that there's only one permanent racetrack currently in operation that's hosted events sanctioned by NASCAR, the Indy Racing League, Formula One and defunct Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) -- a big four of world motorsport if there ever was one. True, Riverside International Raceway hosted NASCAR forever, a single F1 grand prix in 1960, and CART from 1981-83. But the place is a shopping mall parking lot today. And while Champ Cars competed at Indianapolis over the course of that circuit's history, the races were officially sanctioned by the U.S. Auto Club prior to the birth of the IRL in 1996.

A list of the winners at Watkins Glen is an impressive one: Tony Stewart, Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Tim Richmond and Rusty Wallace in NASCAR, Bobby Unser and Rick Mears in the CART days, Scott Dixon in three of the four events since the IndyCar returned to the track in 2005. For two decades Watkins Glen was a Formula One stop, and the winners included Emerson Fittipaldi, Gilles Villeneuve (whom the Montreal road circuit is named for), Niki Lauda and the incomparable Jackie Stewart. Before the race left due to financial difficulties, the star drivers of the 1960s and '70s spent their free time lounging by pools at little lakeside hotels, a scene impossible to imagine today.

Watkins Glen is not just a great road course, but a great racetrack, period, in the way that Michael Phelps is not just a great swimmer but a great athlete. It doesn't have a perfect resume -- Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt and Dale Earnhardt never won there, the F1 races were plagued by equipment failures, American open-wheel racing was absent for 23 years, and the place has a spotty financial history. It isn't Indianapolis, the most famous racetrack on the planet, and it isn't Daytona, with an almost unparalleled list of past champions. It doesn't have a Fan Deck or a superstretch or a pagoda or a Gasoline Alley. But Kyle Busch won last Sunday afternoon on the 11 most underrated turns in all of auto racing, a place that doesn't look illustrious but unquestionably is.

And to those out there who don't think NASCAR belongs on road courses -- think again. The first professional race at Watkins Glen was a NASCAR Grand National (now Sprint Cup) event won by Buck Baker in 1957. All three of NASCAR's national divisions have competed on the layout, which seems to fit stock cars with its long straightaways and premium on horsepower. The Cup tour has visited the 2.45-mile layout 26 times, more than any other major motorsports series. Watkins Glen isn't a road course where NASCAR comes to visit. It's a place where NASCAR has a home.

Sure, it's not very pretty to look at. Sure, it appears a little rundown in places, although the track is hoping more capital improvements will rectify that. Certainly, everyone wonders what will become of the place when and if parent company International Speedway Corp. ever builds its long-sought-after racetrack in the New York City area. But between those blue guardrails, Watkins Glen International is impeccable. It's legendary. And it's almost without peer.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer