Lime Rock Park Historic Festival: The east coast’s premier vintage racing and concours event presents three days of on-track racing. Including more than 250 cars and drivers, parading and racing everything from pre-WWI racers to the best competition machines from the 1920s to the 1970s. This year’s featured race group will be Formula Fords. Italian Masterpieces such as Ferrari and Lamborghini will be the stars Sunday’s Concours d’ Elegance. The Lime Rock Park Historic Festivalis this raceway’s most accessible event for day-trippers.
About Lime Rock Park
It can be easily argued that Connecticut’s Lime Rock Park is the most significantly historic road racing circuit in North America. Only Wisconsin’s Road America and California’s Laguna Seca can compare to Lime Rock with respect to longest continuous operation. Road America opened in 1955. Laguna Seca and Lime Rock in 1957. But only Lime Rock’s circuit remains exactly the same as when it opened in spring of that year.
And it was Lime Rock Park that hosted the race that forever changed the face of motorsports in America. The 1959 Formula Libre event. The best pros and the best amateurs in the best cars went head-to-head in a three-heat format. Thanks in equal part to its major media coverage and the startling result – Indy 500 winner Roger Ward won the contest in a midget. He bested F1 cars and world championship sports cars. The Formula Libre weekend knocked down the walls that had separated professional road racing drivers from their amateur brethren.
One of the coolest things in Litchfield County
Thanks to Lime Rock and the Formula Libre event, sports car road racing became a significant element of the American sporting scene.
Lime Rock is 1.50 miles of up hill and down dale. It is a track that looks deceivingly simple but is immensely challenging to drive quickly. Its setting is a village in Connecticut’s Litchfield County, renowned for its vast historical, cultural and recreational resources. Lime Rock’s history is inextricably entwined with that of sports car racing’s. Almost all of the sport’s greats have raced here. From that industry changing Formula Libre race through the SCCA hay days of the 1960s, 70s and 80s in Can-Am, F5000, Trans-Am and Atlantic as well as the Camel GTP and ALMS championships. From the mid-1990s onward, Lime Rock has seen everything from ground-pounding NASCAR stockers and modifieds to the technological tour de force IMSA prototypes.
