This week saw the announcement of a new $350M speedway complex to be built in the Mobile, AL area. According to a segment on Speed TV’s Wind Tunnel last night, investors for the project include Dale Earnhardt Jr. and other members of the Earnhardt family. It also appears that the facility will start off with a seating capacity of 70,000 which indicates that the owners must be pretty confident of landing some major series dates very quickly. Of course the Earnhardts are close to the France family, who control NASCAR, so a Nextel Cup date isn’t an impossibility.

Then I read at Crash.net that the facility will also include a “road course designed for single-seater racing, including Formula One.“

F1 !!

Now that is a big ambition. Yet The F1 power brokers have shown a recent preference for new purpose built tracks over the traditional natural terrain road courses, and the date for US Grand Prix at Indy is on a year by year basis at the moment - so who knows by the time this new facility opens in 2009 the US GP may yet have another home.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Formula One, NASCAR, Tracks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.