just to add a little bit more historic flavour:
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Linas-Montlhéry's motor-racing track
L'age d'Or / The Golden Era
The man responsible for the creation in 1924 of this racetrack 24 kms from Paris close to the towns of Linas and Montlhéry, (the reason for its official title of " Linas-Montlhéry's motor-racing track ") was an industrialist: Alexandre Lamblin. The owner of a factory producing radiators for cars and planes and of a sportsmagazine, "l'Aero-sport", he had the idea of providing France - and more particularly the Paris area which was at that time one of the principal centres of the French car industry - with a racetrack.
The early 1920s were a time of records and competitions of all kinds (car against plane...). In addition, Great Britain had already built the Brooklands track in 1907, the United States had a racetrack in Indianapolis since 1911 and Italy in Monza since 1922.
In 1923, Alexandre LAMBLIN, after having made some projects for the acquisition of a hundred hectares on the plateau located between Montlhery and Nozay, bought a field located on the Saint-Eutrope plateau, in Linas, close to Montlhéry. Two studies were undertaken and the least Track mapexpensive, envisaging a 2,5 km length ring, possibly supplemented by an external road circuit, was chosen.
Engineer Raymond JAMIN was hired to design the track . It is oval with two short straight lines of 180 meters. In the turns, it has a concave profile in the shape of a cubic parabola with a vertical axis and connections are traced according to a spiral logarithmic curve, which constitutes one of the characteristics of the design. The ring is calculated so that cars of 1 000 kg can reach, in the top of the turns, speeds of approximately 220 km/h. Its development, measured in the middle of its projection on a horizontal level is 2 548.24 metres (centre line). Two thousand workmen, masons, metal workers, scrap merchants, carpenters and truckdrivers worked for six months on the construction of the track, using 1 000 tons of steel and 8 000 m3 of concrete. Many ready-made units were used, making it an avant-garde construction for that time.
Montlhéry soon attracted a great number of pioneers of speed and their monstrous record cars, coming over from England because of the many noise restrictions (assembly of silencers, prohibition of races at night) imposed by the neighbours of the Brooklands circuit. Over one hundred records, were established or beaten just two months after the opening. It was the make Rolland Pilain which was the first to do so, and the solo circuit record on the ring was to be held for a long time by Gwenda Stewart in a Derby-Miller with an average of 234,681 km/h.
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