Good to see DSM has an SCCA chapter alive and kicking. It doesn't appear they have a "home track", as the road racing events they have listed on their site are in other states - Kansas, Missouri, even Oklahoma (Hallett, which, by reputation, is supposed to be a wonderful facility. A lot of the guys in the club I belong to have run down there and rave about it. I have hopes of making the trek down someday)
They do seem to run some local autocross-type events "locally" (i.e. around Central Iowa), so that is good. That's a good way for people to get a toe in the water at not much cost...which can then be a gateway drug for getting involved in the club more seriously.
The SCCA at large is still a pretty big deal within amateur racing circles, though it's certainly not in the public consciousness the way it would have been in the heyday of sports car racing in the USA in the 50's and 60's. As an interesting side note, the SCCA was the sanctioning body for CART after the "first split" in '79 when CART originally split from USAC. In modern times, the SCCA seems to vary in popularity from region to region as there is some healthy competition in some areas from newer organizations like NASA, but they do a good job of keeping at least a presence pretty much everywhere in the form of autrocross and "Track Night in America" events in places where they don't have the facilities or membership numbers available for full on race events.
As far as Greenwood goes, that was a fun reminder - I had kind of forgotten about that track! If you're a road racing enthusiast, it's kind of a sad and all too typical story. It was built in the 60's and only really lasted a few years but, in that time, hosted a couple of top-level SCCA professional races (back when SCCA was still dabbling in such things). I believe there were multiple efforts to revive it and it may have even hosted a few one off events, but it's been completely dormant for at least 40 years. Well...not completely dormant I suppose, because it's now owned by "Iowa Operating Engineers" who use it as a training facility. If you search "Greenwood Roadway, Indianola, IA" on Google Maps, it comes right up. If you go to satellite view, it's very clear that the track - as far as abandoned racetracks go - is in spectacular condition. The racing surface itself could be brought up to raceable condition with tantalizingly little effort/investment. Safety improvements would likely be the big expense, as you'd probably need to remove quite a few trees from the looks of things and also maybe even some dirt depending on the specifics of the topography. "Safety" when the track was built in the 60's basically amounted to "hey, tell those kids sitting on the outside of turn 3 to take two big steps back from the edge of the track".
I have a great set of books called "Ghost Tracks" written by a guy named Pete Hylton who was, at one time, the official historian of the SCCA. He's got a nice little blurb about Greenwood, which he visited in the early 2000's. Sounds like the course would be a lot of fun; a nice variety of corners and some elevation change as well. I took a screenshot of the Google Maps satellite view and (crudely) annotated it with some of Pete's great track notes (apparently, Iowa Operating Engineers let him drive/walk the course circa 2002). It's actually a decently long track - the longest straight is nearly a half mile long and, using a measuring tool, I am getting a length of about 2.87 miles. Just for reference/perspective, this would make it about the 14th longest track on the 21 race 2018 Formula 1 schedule (roughly the same length as the track that the Spanish Grand Prix has been run on in recent years). So, in terms of scale at least, not exactly a rinky-dink facility carved out by a couple guys with a backhoe and a couple packs of Busch Light. Someone(s) put some real effort into making this track back in the day.
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Here is a recent-ish tour of the track in it's current state in some guy's bugeye sprite. The track is very narrow in places, but gets quite wide as you go through the speedy bottom section. They apparently had some kind of 50th anniversary event at the facility in 2013 called the "Greenwood Revival" (a play on the world famous Goodwood Revival event in Britain).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnNKPUZBWww
Some great archival footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6WqBxl0W8
And someone has even created it as a mod for the rFactor racing simulation - I'll be downloading and driving this later!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhTf8onKBwU
