Rouen Les Essarts

French race track

Rouen, Through the Normandy Woods

Public roads through the wooded hills outside Rouen formed a circuit once ranked among Europe's finest, host to five French Grands Prix before it closed for good.

Rouen Les Essarts borrowed its roads from the public and its name from a village that no longer stands on its own. The circuit lay at Orival, just outside Rouen in Normandy, on public roads through a wooded hillside, and Les Essarts, the village it was named for, was later merged into Grand Couronne. When it opened in 1950 it was ranked among the finest circuits in Europe, thanks to up to date pits, a generously wide track and proper grandstands for the crowds.

Drivers remembered the land itself. From the cobbled Nouveau Monde hairpin at the southern tip, the road climbed from 56 meters to 149 meters at Gresil on gradients steeper than 9 percent, threading blind corners between the trees. The first course measured 5.100 km. Extensive work in 1955 lengthened it to 6.542 km, the version most people picture, and later a new autoroute sliced across the circuit and cut it to 5.543 km, the modern world having its own idea of a fast road.

Rouen held the French Grand Prix five times between 1952 and 1968. Alberto Ascari won the first for Ferrari, and Juan Manuel Fangio won in 1957 for Maserati. Dan Gurney won twice, in 1962 with Porsche and in 1964 with Brabham, and no one else won here more than once. The last of the five, in 1968, went to Jacky Ickx for Ferrari, but it is remembered for the death of Jo Schlesser, whose car crashed and caught fire at Six Frères, a quick downhill curve.

Formula 2 raced at Rouen until 1978, and French national championships carried on after that, but racing on public roads could no longer be reconciled with modern safety standards or the sport's finances. The circuit closed in 1994. In 1999 its grandstands, pits, barriers and signs were taken away, and the cobbles at Nouveau Monde vanished under asphalt. The roads themselves remain, and the original lap through the woods can still be driven, at a pace the local police would consider reasonable.

Every Grand Prix here

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