The 1950s brought to America the newfound joys of sportscar racing and because few dedicated road courses yet existed, race organizers were content to let these gorgeous racecars rip down public roads side-by-side with their drivers goggled, gloved, and grimed while grabbing gears in mostly open-cockpit racers. This was the heyday of temporary road courses, usually snaking through picturesque rural scenery on highways lined with thousands of people eager to take in this curious and death-defying new sport.

At Brynfan Tyddyn, this meant about 15(ish) turns on a tree-lined 3.5-mile course with more than 300 feet of elevation change. If you’re unfamiliar with its name, you may at first think that Brynfan Tyddyn was an obscure and seldom-used stage of Wales Rally GB. Rather, nestled in the hills just north of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, lies a stretch of public roads that once formed the circuit.

The Sports Car Club of America laid claim to Brynfan Tyddyn in 1952, charting the circuit around state senator T. Newell Wood’s property near Harvey Lake, just across the Susquehanna River from the recently revived Giants Despair Hill Climb (of which Wood also served as president). The course’s start/finish line (A) began on Schoolhouse Road, making a right-hand bend followed by another right turn onto Church Road (B), which would feature the course’s highest elevation (C) before entering a carousel-style right-hander (D) that dropped nearly 150 feet before turning onto Outlet Road (E). A couple of hard turns on Outlet led back to Schoolhouse Road (F), which then climbed steeply before a sharp right led to the famous Irish Curve (G) that put drivers back on the long, flat start/finish straight (H).

The races at Brynfan Tyddyn—which in Welsh means “Hill Top Homestead” or ” Large Farm on the Hill,” depending on who translates—would be held on the same weekend as the hill climb and the two events drew tens of thousands of spectators from 1952 to 1956. Large draws were a normal occurrence for road racing in the 1950s; the road races near Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, famously drew more than 100,000 people and it proved a complete weekend diversion for both the curious and the gearhead.

That inaugural year saw five 10-lap races with each race featuring a mix of classes, apparently, although each class seems to have been mostly MGs and Siatas. Regardless, 10 laps of the grueling three-mile course equated to roughly 35-40 minutes of race time. Otto Linton won the first race in his Crosley-powered Siata Sport, but it was John Gordon Bennett and his MG TD that made out best with a win and a second place to go along with a class win in that year’s Giants Despair Hill Climb.

The SCCA returned in 1953 and garage engineer Candy Poole made a name for himself by entering his PBX Special, driven by sportscar wizard Dolph Vilardi. Poole’s PBX would win the H-Modified class from 1953 to 1955 with Candy piloting it in ’54 and ’55. By modern standards, it’s a tiny and terrifying piece of machinery, but these were the days when helmets were for sissies and rollcages were…what the heck is a rollcage again?

The proliferation of MG in the U.S. meant that the make got its own SCCA class and it would field the most entrants in Brynfan Tyddyn’s years. But the competing cars from ’52 to ’55 are a veritable tribute to the glory of beautiful (mostly) open-top sportscars: OSCA MT4, Triumph TR2 and TR3, Lotus Mark VI, Porsche 356, and Siata 300BC.

Only Poole and Linton would grab multiple wins at Brynfan Tyddyn. The final SCCA races there were held July 21, 1956. In a bizarre twist, a spectator took a competitor’s Siata for a test drive around the course before the races without race officials’ permission. The spectator-driver, Carl Gardner Jr., lost control of the Italian racer and hit a telephone pole. He would die of his injuries.

The pre-race death marred the weekend (irreparably as it turned out), but the races continued that day. In one of the four races, a 32-year-old racer named Chuck Dietrich would get not only his first career win but also the first U.S. victory for legendary British builder Elva. Dietrich would go on to a long racing and successful club racing career—mostly in Elvas—and be given the honorary SCCA License No. 1 for his long and prolific career. That year would also see a chicken farmer named Carroll Shelby take home a win in his Ferrari 500TR. Shelby’s win at was just one of 19 that season—including winning his class at the Giants Despair Hill Climb the following day—a remarkable feat.

And that was it. After the non-competitor’s death, Brynfan Tyddyn hosted no more races, although the Giants Despair Hill Climb still runs every July on the same stretch of Northumberland Street in Laurel Run. The area tried to host one more road race in 1959 near Berwick at a former tank-testing facility, but the course proved far more tame than the Welsh-named circuit and no attempt was made to return there.

Enough reading, though. The best thing you can do is to capture the atmosphere is watch this old film footage of racers streaking around the corners of Brynfan Tyddyn and Giants Despair in 1955. The film is silent, but it’s not hard to hear in your head the relentless wailing tires of four-wheel drifts and glorious howl of finely tuned race motors through open headers.

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBQ16QibRA[/youtube]

The roads that made up Brynfan Tyddyn still exist near Harveys Lake and are likely in far better condition than the crumbling, narrow asphalt that made up the mid-1950s course. It’s a little out of my way to go, but if any Pennsylvania Hoons take a lap, be sure to shoot some video.

[Sources: Harveys Lake History, RacingSportscars.com, The Chicane, BarcBoys.com, Sports Racer Network, TopoQuest | Image Sources: etceterinicars YouTube channel, Google Maps, RacingSportscars.com]