Barber Motorsports Park

The man who built this place made his fortune in milk. George Barber inherited Barber Dairies from his father in nineteen seventy and spent nearly three decades growing it into one of the Southeast's leading dairy companies. He was also, quietly, a serious racing driver, with sixty-three victories to his name in Porsche competition. When he sold the dairy business in nineteen ninety-eight, he poured tens of millions of dollars into a vision he had been assembling for years: the largest motorcycle museum in the world.

The museum began as a private collection in nineteen eighty-eight. It relocated here to Leeds in two thousand three, along with a road course designed with input from racing legends Dan Gurney and John Surtees. The building's spiral layout, which visitors sometimes compare to the Guggenheim, was actually modeled on a Birmingham parking deck. Inside are more than sixteen hundred motorcycles spanning more than a century of design, a collection that holds the Guinness World Record for the largest on earth. George Barber died in early twenty twenty-six at age eighty-five.