Still is: at least now, it’s all “paved” (quotes due to differing opinions of ‘paved!’)
My stepdad claimed he was involved in creating that road during WWII. “Paved” meant chopping down a bunch of trees and laying the logs side by side over a mudhole so trucks could get through it. When driving the road decades later, he said there were places you could still see those “corrugated” sections.
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I read about that “paving” technique: beats driving on tundra and muskeg!
Love that story.
Reminds me of one my dad told of driving in Oregon. Before I was born. They were towing a small trailer of belongings during a reassignment. Was going downhill and saw a wheel roll past. It had come off the trailer.
I knew a guy that had a similar experience – in a race car doing 100+ mph.
Whew! Bet that made some interesting few seconds for him.
Glad my dad’s tire was off the trailer
It wasn’t just the wheel, either; it was the entire upright and brake assembly.
The guy had recently purchased the car, a TVR, from a guy who was retiring from racing. The car had a reputation for losing wheels; I had personally watched it lose a wheel seven times, I understand the actual count over a decade of racing was something like 40 times. He would show up to the Sebring 12-hour with spare suspensions for both sides. When a wheel was lost, he’d just drive it around the course on 3 wheels to the pits, install another rear suspension, and be back in the race in 20 minutes.
So this guy that bought the car knew none of this. He’s heading down the straight at PBIR, which has a little kink in it, and applies the brakes to enter Turn 1. No brakes – because the RR wheel is bounding off through the weeds. There’s an escape road but it’s not straight, you’ve gotta turn a bit to get onto it. He heads for the escape road but the turn starts the car spinning. He fights with it, eventually gets it to straighten out – but by this time he’s reached the end of the escape road where it comes back out onto the track. He’s headed straight for a concrete retaining wall on the other side of the track. So he yanks the wheel the other way to slide the car sideways, and it comes to a stop in the middle of the track just a few feet from the wall.
He unbuckles his safety harness and opens the door only to see a corner worker running toward him with a machete in his hand yelling “Look out for the snake!” He thinks, yeah, PBIR is famous for snakes, but I couldn’t care less right now. He steps out of the car and nearly steps on a 6-foot rattlesnake, evidently dragged out of the weeds by his spinning car. It was mad. He jumps right back into the TVR and slams the door and watches while the corner worker slices the snake into bite-size pieces.
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I cain’t top that tale!
Dang!
That is a heck of a story. Poor guy was snakebit…but not literally
PBIR was literally created by dredging muck out of the swamp and piling it to make enough dry land to create a race track. If you ran off course, chances are good you’d end up in the water. One guy with a Datsun roadster ended up so far into the drink that the only things above the water were the top of his roll bar and the top corners of the taillights. When they towed his car outta there, there was a fish in it! At the end of the race weekend there is a trophy presentation to the winners, and they awarded this guy a fishing trophy.
The guys who worked the corners usually brought fishing poles. They were forever standing with their backs to the track, casting a line into a canal. They’d also use the radios to keep a running tally of the number of rattlesnakes killed over a race weekend, which often numbered 30 or 40.
IIRC, a guy was killed there once. Was driving a formula car, flipped it upside down into a canal. The pointy roll bar sank into the soft mud at the bottom of the canal and he couldn’t get out, and help couldn’t get there in time to keep him from drowning. There was some discussion about changing the rules regarding the shape of roll bars, but I dunno if anything came of it.
Olivier Chandron, heir to a French champagne fortune
BBQ snake sandwiches are said to be tasty…
If there was muck at the bottom, the shape of the roll bar would be of no consequence.