The Gotland Ring under construction
Tuesday, 21st April 2009 by Alex Turnbull
The island of Gotland is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Sweden, and is also home to the Gotland Ring, a motorsports racetrack carved into an old limestone quarry which, once finished, will be the longest racetrack on Earth.
Today about 3km of the Northern loop are currently in use1, but around 7km will be ready by next year. As well as the track itself, Google's images let us see the absolutely massive wind turbines that form part of the operator's vision to be the most environmentally friendly racing facility of its type in the world.
Although it's far from complete at this stage, these images do also let us begin to see the profile of the Southern Loop, which will apparently be ready for "tarmac installation" next year, but won't be ready for racing until 2012. As this diagram demonstrates, when finished the two loops will be joined, allowing drivers to race around one complete circuit totalling 28km.2
The land on which the track is being built belongs to a company called Nordkalk, and as the imagery makes quite obvious, it used to be a large limestone quarry. It looks like production of limestone is still in full flow here, judging by the activity going on at the nearby lake, and in fact much of the crushed stone needed for building the circuit was provided by the mining operation.
Gotland Ring does have a Wikipedia page, but it currently reads like a badly translated press release. Perhaps a kindly Swede could do a better job of translating the key points from the official site?
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You can even try it yourself apparently! ↩︎
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That's over 7km longer than the current longest race track, The Nürburgring, which is a whole other post! ↩︎
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
28 km! Even the Stig wouldn’t do that in a minute…
Of course he wouldn’t! He did it in 0:59,98. He stated that he will be a little faster, when they finish laying the tarmac…
Interesting fact about the island of Gotland: It’s just big enough to be able to fit in all 6 billion of us humans if we were all standing up straight.
Oh, I always thought that was the case for the Ilse of Wight, which is rather smaller than Gotland. Surely world population hasn’t grown that much of late? Might have to revise my interesting-fact-for-awkward-silence repository!
The population of the World is at time of writing, around 6.77 billion. The CIA world factbook estimates that by July of this year, the population will stand at around 6.9 billion. There are lots of graphs on the World population Wikipedia page, but I think this one illustrates best the kind of growth we’re dealing with:
I also found a wiki.answers.com page, which says the following:
Gotland by comparison is 3,140 million square metres, so given today’s population of 6,770 million, we’d only have to squeeze in 2.16 people per square metre to fit everybody on Gotland.
Far from the first time since starting this site, it looks like we all need to update our awkward-silence repository!
The Gotland Ring official site is available in English so no translation required!
It’s obvious that it’s this English translation that’s been the source of the content for the Wikipedia article!
So I looked at the details on the public driving…
It requires a yearly membership to the Gotlam Ring Club. Plus either a fee for each public driving period or you can get a seasons pass.
Sounds expensive right? Actually is surprisingly affordable!
In US Dollars it’s ONLY about $38.00 for the yearly club membership. Each public driving event is about $107.00. As much fun as this would be I would go ahead and go all out and get a season pass for about $1,070.00, a savings of about $1,300 if you plan to participate in all 23 of the events offered for the year.
*other drivers, passengers, instructor lessons, safety equipment for rent all cost a bit extra.
Nice to finally se a good post from my beautiful homecountry. Although it’s been ages since I have been to Gotland.
A little know fact/fiction is that the gothic historian, i.e. he lived during the 6th cenutry, Jordanes claims that the gotic tribe originated on the island of Gotland.