Zandvoort
Here is a circuit that still operates today, albeit in an abbreviated fashion. What remains, though, is a clear reminder of this once wonderful circuit that snakes its way through the sand dunes on the North Sea coast and which used to be one of the best attended of all the European grand prix circuits.
Some parts of some grand prix circuits look alike, but not one of Zandvoort's corners could be mistaken for being anywhere else, which isn't surprising: none of the other top circuits to host Formula One twisted their way through sand dunes. Bridgehampton in the USA was also laid out among dunes, but that hosted Can-Am sportscars rather than F1. So, if ever you see a shot of a Ferrari, Vanwall or Lotus being guided through some twisters flanked by tufted dunes, you can be sure that it was taken at the Netherlands' premier circuit.
Zandvoort was a fabulous and distinctive place to go racing and, even now, in its current truncated form, it has a special character that is made all the more redolent of bygone glory as it has been off the World Championship rota for almost three decades.
Opened for business in 1948, it was created from link roads that had been built between gun emplacements just in from the sea west of Amsterdam by the German army during the Second World War. The clear character of its circuit design was the way that it was made up largely of high-speed sweepers which undulated through the dunes. The final corner, Bos Uit, was a wonderfully long corner feeding the cars onto the lengthy start/finish straight at appreciable speed for slipstreaming all the way down to the double-right called Tarzan at its far end. Late-braking overtaking moves have always been a feature of racing here, with every move being made potentially fraught by sand blowing off the dunes. It was very much a drivers' circuit and the thousands of fans who turned out even in foul weather to watch the action added a special atmosphere too.
After holding a couple of non-championship Formula One races in 1950 and 1951, both won by Louis Rosier in a Lago-Talbot, Zandvoort joined the World Championship in 1952, when Alberto Ascari scored the first of two consecutive wins for Ferrari. The circuit was popular straight away, but it was also a place with a sad side, as shown when Piers Courage met a fiery death in 1970 and then Roger Williamson likewise in 1973, when an atrocious standard of marshalling left his greatest chance of surviving in the hands of David Purley. (Purley stopped his own car to run back and try to turn the inverted March back over to rescue him while marshals clad in shirtsleeves stood and stared, and a nearby fire tender elected not to go against the flow of the circuit to attempt to save him.) On a happier note, Zandvoort made history when Lotus gave F1 most successful engine its debut when Jim Clark gave the Ford Cosworth DFV a winning start in 1967.
The racing was invariably competitive and great scraps included James Hunt's McLaren against John Watson's Penske in 1976. Yet, as money ran short, the final Dutch GP came in 1985, when Niki Lauda claimed the final win of his F1 career.
The circuit then fell on hard financial times and had to be taken over by the town council. This was pivotal; it was already under pressure from noise abatement. Fortunately, it lived to fight another day, albeit in truncated form. To address noise concerns, a dune was created between the circuit and the town, with the lap losing more than 1.6km (1 mile) from its length; the track was made to turn right at Hunserug before running through a new loop that brought it back to the original circuit just after the exit of the final corner. That was in 1979, but a decade later it was given its dignity back and the current layout was adopted, with the original run from Hunserug to Scheivlak and then Marlborobocht being reinstated before the track turned right onto another new loop that twisted its way back around to the 1989 loop. There was no chance of returning to the original layout, because houses were built on its furthest reaches after the 1989 transformation.
