Lime Rock Park

Lime Rock Park is a natural-terrain motorsport road racing venue located in Lime Rock, Connecticut, a hamlet in the village of Lakeville, Connecticut, in the state’s northwest corner. The track is owned by Skip Barber, a former race car driver who started the Skip Barber Racing School in 1975.

Track
For years, the track was listed as being 1.53 miles in length—the story goes that right after it was built, somebody used the odometer in a Chevy to measure the track length—and 1.53 was taken as gospel. Following the 2008 reconstruction (see below), Lime Rock's operations people measured all four possible configurations, and as it turns out, each was 1.5-miles long, plus or minus a few hundred feet. The "classic" configuration is 7 turns, while the three optional layouts are 8, 9 and 10 turns.

History
Two years after the park first opened in 1957, the Lime Rock Protective Association, with support from the nearby Trinity Episcopal Church, took the park to Litchfield Superior Court in an effort to ban Sunday racing. The court issued a permanent injunction against Sunday racing and its decision was upheld by the Connecticut Supreme Court. Although park officials have expressed a desire to return to limited Sunday racing, the injunction stands to this day.

The track was also the home track of Paul Newman, who supported his own Newman-Haas team with Bob Sharp. Paul Newman became the primary driver, who along with his superior acting career and philanthropic charities, raced in Trans-Am events. Initially, the effort was supported by Datsun (later Nissan) later sponsors included Canon, Planters Peanuts and Pepsi. Paul Newman later partnered with Carl Haas to form an Indy car team. Paul raced successfully at Lime Rock in SCCA GT-1 events into his 82nd year. Bob Sharp's son, Scott raced Indy Cars and CART and is presently racing sports cars (Ferrari) under the Patron sponsorship (2012).