A road course on an old Christmas-tree farm in Grattan Township

Drive out into the rolling country northeast of Rockford and you’ll find two miles of asphalt looping through what used to be a Christmas-tree and flower farm. That’s Grattan Raceway, a real road course. Not an oval — a winding track that turns both left and right the way a back road does. It runs a 3,200-foot straightaway into a 160-degree hairpin, then drops you through a downhill corner where the road tilts the wrong way. That corner has unsettled drivers for sixty years.

A group of local sports-car racers found the old farm in Grattan Township in the early 1960s and carved a circuit out of it. The Faasen family has owned and run it ever since. For a track stuck in the woods of Kent County, it pulled a surprising guest list. Paul Newman drove here. So did Walter Payton and Tom Cruise. IndyCar teams used to bring their cars to Grattan to shake them down before the Detroit Grand Prix. Drivers who’ve run a hundred tracks still rank it among the finest in the country. It asks so much of them — all that elevation change, all those blind crests, all that committing to a corner you can’t fully see.

There’s a motocross track on the property too, so on a busy weekend you’ll hear both the high whine of sports cars on the road course and the snarl of dirt bikes off in the trees.

It’s the kind of place you smell before you see it: hot brakes, race fuel, cut grass on the verges of an old tree farm that found a second life letting people go fast in circles through it.