There are a couple of books I am using as historical references in my ongoing effort to update the website and add more historical coverage. I'm going to review them over the next couple of days.
The first is Lost Race Tracks: Treasures of Automobile Racing, by Gordon Eliot White (Iconographix, 2002, ISBN 1-58388-084-4). The book is coffee-table-ish in size, in trade paper format, with 126 pages of content. It covers +/- 117 race tracks at one page per track. Thus, the coverage is not even remotely exhaustive, but the information per track is reasonably detailed. Each page provides a paragraph or two of background, a photo, and a map showing the location of the track.
The focus is on racing venues that are no longer with us, some of which still have visible traces and others of which are entirely gone. It also includes some historic one-offs like the first North American auto race (Chicago to Evanston and back, 1895.) Data is from various sources -- topo maps, newspaper records, and other sources. The selection of tracks is interesting. Most are in the US, but some are outside of the country.
In summary, I am finding this book useful, in particular because White has gone to the trouble to be specific about where the tracks are, something that Brown (which I'll review later) can't do for various reasons (mostly size, Brown covers 8000 tracks in 850 pages).