What’s the Cost of Building a Race

Track?
June 19, 2004
Brent Ozar
21 Comments

GM Race Track in Michigan

I’ve always had a fantasy of owning my own race track: win some obscene fortune in the lotto,
then build a track that’s all my own with a stable full of hot cars. Like a real-life arcade game.
I’m not a particularly good driver – not bad, just not above average – but I’d love to spend hours
honing my skills in a safe environment while having fun.

I wouldn’t even need very expensive cars: it’d take me years before I could appreciate the
benefits of a Ferrari over a Corvette. And I don’t have high expectations: I’d be just as happy
whipping a Miata around the track as I would a more expensive car. The fun in racing is around
probing your limits and the car’s limits. Of course, you can’t do either of those on public roads.

Enter the General. GM built a new test track in Milford, Michigan that duplicates a lot of the
difficulty of the legendary Nurburgring track in the mountains of Germany. This aerial photo of
the track shows the various configurations that let it be a high-speed oval, a twisty short track,
and lots of variations in between. It even has beautiful thick pockets of trees! (I hate racetracks
that are plopped down in the middle of a field.) The only thing I’d improve is building it along a
river or beach, but GM can’t do that for their track because they’d get spy photographers boating
in all the time for scoops.

What’s the Cost to Build a Paved Racetrack?

The interesting part (to me, at least) is that it only cost $7 million to build. SEVEN MILLION!
Pocket change for somebody who wins the $145 million Texas Lotto this week. Okay, well, it’s
still a lot of money, but for something that you could enjoy for life – heck, I’d be happy to live in
a $150,000 house – as long as it was on the grounds of this track. Wow.

I’ve done some research, and generally it costs around $100,000 per mile for two-lane pavement.

Two lanes isn’t nearly wide enough for a racetrack, though, so figure $200,000 per mile
minimum in order to build a racetrack four lanes wide.  You want to drift sideways without
going off the road, right?  Dirt tracks are starting to look pretty good.

Wide Racetrack

Then toss in things like:

 Gravel runoffs and tire walls

 Landscaping
 Grading and banking curves
 Adding hills

And it’s easy to see how a simple four-mile paved racetrack would exceed $1,000,000 – and
that’s even before the cost of buying the land and maintaining the pavement.  Pavement has a
limited lifecycle – you can’t have potholes on your racetrack, you know.  Next, you have to hire
or contract out a road crew, and build facilities for their equipment.

Facilities!  That reminds me – we’re gonna need a pit row…

It’s a good thing I’ll never win the lotto.

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2004/06/whats-cost-of-building-race-track/