Bathurst, New South Wales · AU
The Mountain. Australia's most iconic racing venue climbs Mount Panorama on public roads with 570 feet of elevation change. The Bathurst 1000 is the nation's greatest race, with the Conrod Straight hitting 186+ mph.
Mount Panorama is a public road for most of the year and a race circuit for a handful of weekends, and it climbs and descends an actual mountain — around 174 metres of elevation change across a lap. The run up through Griffins Bend and The Cutting is steep and narrow; the top section across Skyline and down through The Dipper is fast, blind and lined with concrete; and Conrod Straight, at 1.9 kilometres, sends Supercars towards 300 km/h before The Chase.
Because it is a road, you can drive the circuit yourself outside event weekends at the posted speed limit, which is worth doing to understand how narrow and steep it genuinely is. On race weekends the campsites on the mountain are the heart of the atmosphere, and the shuttle from Harris Park at the bottom to Reid Park at the top saves a serious walk.
The circuit exists because of a piece of Depression-era opportunism. Bathurst's mayor, Martin Griffin, secured federal unemployment-relief funding to build what was presented as a scenic tourist road over Mount Panorama. The Scenic Drive opened on 17 March 1938, and racing followed almost immediately — before the surface had fully cured, the Easter programme ran two days of motorcycle racing followed by two days of cars.
The race the mountain is known for started elsewhere. The Armstrong 500 was first run at Phillip Island in 1960, moved to Bathurst in 1963 over the same 500-mile distance, and became a 1,000-kilometre race in 1973. As the Bathurst 1000 it grew into one of the largest events on the Australian sporting calendar, spoken about in the same terms as the Melbourne Cup.
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