What do you do if you’re stupidly rich and like cars and motorcycles? You build your own race track.
Alan Wilzig, son of a holocaust survivor who amassed a fortune from oil and banking has built a race track in the backyard of one of his properties. In a man’s world, that is enough to make you put the beer you’re holding straight back down on its coaster. Wilzig, who took control of his father’s bank, The Trust Company of New Jersey, and sold it to North Fork Bankcorp for a sum of money you and I are never likely to see in our lives, created the 1-mile track for his large collection of cars and motorcycles.
An amateur motorbike racer, he needed the track to practice and let his cars loose in his spare time. The track itself is an original creation that includes a banked turn as well. “NASCAR is pretty much the only form of racing I don’t watch, Wilzig said to Jalopnik.com, “but the banking has turned out to be everyone’s favorite turn. My four-year-old daughter calls it the “crazy turn.'”
Wilzig had some serious challenges in getting the track up and running, including opposition from council and neighbours, but was granted permission to complete the project in early 2011 by the New York State Court of Appeals.
The end result was the largest private race track zoned for recreational use in America. It has nine turns including the banked corner but no real high-speed straight. It’s a truly amazing project which most men would be happy to partake in if they had the required funds. If you can’t see the track in the map below, scroll over to your left a bit.
Via Jalopnik
