Wilzig Racing Manor

WILZIG RACING MANOR

ROUNDUP

One man's 1.1-mile private racetrack

MATTHEW MILES

MINUTES AFTER RETIRED BANKER AND LONG-time motorcycle enthusiast Alan Wilzig won his four-year land-use battle in New York's Columbia County, he called in the paving trucks and began laying asphalt. That was two years ago, and now, his 40-foot-wide, 1.1-mile private circuit— plat de résistance being a 20-degree banked corner—is a smooth, black ribbon of tarmac crisply hemmed at elvery bend in orange and white.

Last summer, I visited Wilzig and his family. After I spent an afternoon of hot laps on the track riding a mix of late-model sportbikes, the 47-year-old husband and

father of two talked me around his multi million-dollar creation.

"Turn 1 is actually two turns-i A and lB. It's very complex and challenging. On a bike, if you get a really good drive out of the final corner leading onto the start! finish straight, you can arrive at Turn 1 at 120 mph. You have significant braking, and the braking zone is deceptive, so it can really suck you in. It's a great way to start a lap here."

"If I didn't consider ft to be a bad omen for motorcyclists, I would have called Turn 2

`Highside Hill.' The bike is leaned to the left to negotiate Turn 1, and then you have to immediately flip it right on faith on the face of a blind hill. Just like the Corkscrew at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, if you wait to see where you're going, Ws too late to get there and you'll end uo in the ravel trap."

"In the counterclockwise configuration, which we run most of the time, Turn 2 plunges down into Turn 3. It's one of the few corners here that doesn't have any positive camber, so you really have to use the right line. Turn 3, along with the exit of the banking and final hairpin, has what I consider to be an excruciatingly late apex. From there, we head onto the back straight, which isn't straight because not/i ing here is straight. That's why I describe it as a motorcycle gymkhana circuit-you don't get any rest!"

"Now, we're coming into the banking, which, technically, is Turn 4. I had to be shown the line here, because, like most motorcyclists, I'm not familiar with banked turns. Unless you're running the Daytona 200, you're not going to encounter `super elevation' like this. You approach it like any other big parabolic hairpin: You enter higher than I would have expected; that is the fast line. I'd always associated bank ing with NASCAR or, occasionally, Indycar. Were it not for Keith Code, there would be no banking here."

"The exit of the banking puts you onto a short, straight section that takes us into the `Madsen Esses,' a right-left named after my driving coach. So, if you can't make right-hand Turn 5, you're going to end up in a nice, safe gravel bed, not sliding down the escape road and, possibly, into Turn 1."

"This carousel probably has the most subjectivity of any turn on the track in terms of what line you should take. Really, though, no matter how deep you want to plunge into it and what you think you're going to gain, it's all about the exit."

"I thought this left-right `Code Chicane' section after the carousel should be straight so the average lap speed would come up by a few ticks. But Keith ex plained to me, just like with the banking, `Son, no one cares about that. This is all for fun, right? So, let's make it as fun as possible. Fun on a motorcycle isn't going straight; it's going through corners. So, let's put some esses here and make it in teresting before the final hairpin."

"The Marino Hairpin, Turn 6, is named after my neighbor. He was my very first supporter. He signed an affidavit say ing I should have this track, and he lives closer to it than anyone else. He's ItalianAmerican, so his name sounds like some famous racer. We don't have an Andretti Hairpin or Straight. We haven't named anything after famous racers in the same way that we didn't start out trying to do what Klaas Zwart did at Ascari: copying his favorite corners from his favorite race tracks around the world."

"That takes us back onto the non-straight start/finish straight to do it all over again."