Pete Hylton, Ghost Tracks: A Historic Look At America's Lost Road Racing Tracks. Benton, Kentucky: Legacy Ink, 2007 , ISBN 978-0-9796976-1-6
Over the past 5 or so years, Pete Hylton has contributed an entertaining and informative series of articles to SportsCar under the name "Ghost Tracks". In this series, he chronicles the history surrounding a number of lost road racing venues across the United States. The series is one of the most popular ever published in the SCCA's club magazine.
Now those articles, along with some additional material, have been collected into book form by Legacy Ink Publishing.It's nice to see these collected, and they are as entertaining and informative as they were originally. There has been some change at some of the old venues, and Pete has updated the information as needed.
There are some nits: being the collection of a series of magazine articles, the book is perhaps a little thin, and the construction is fairly light. It reads like a collection of magazine articles (Well duh, that's what it is). Additionally, the various circuit maps, while fairly close to the actual track layouts, aren't perfect, as I found out while trying to trace the course of the "New" Thompson Raceway circuit using imagery from Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps.
On the plus side, the layouts for the various airport circuits are wonderful things to get, as I can find most of the airfields based on their names, but figuring out the old race circuits that were laid out on them can be pretty difficult.
This book is proving to be valuble reference material for the expansion of the historical side of the race track directory on this site, but don't assume that this means you don't need the book. I'm not entering all the history; if you want to read the stories, you're just going to have to buy it or dig up your old copies of SportsCar.
For all the nits, I do strongly recommend this to enthusiasts who are interested in the history of SCCA road racing. You can order it online from the publisher Here, and no, I don't get a kickback. I, though, do want to see more like this written and published.