Braselton: Road Atlanta and the Panoz Racing Empire

Braselton was a quiet railroad hamlet first permanently settled in eighteen eighty-four. It stayed quiet for most of a century. Then in the nineteen eighties, Donald Panoz arrived.

Panoz had made his fortune in pharmaceutical drug-delivery technology, and he used it to build Chateau Elan, a thirty-five-hundred-acre winery and resort modeled on a French Loire Valley chateau. He also took over Road Atlanta, the nearby road-racing circuit that opened in nineteen seventy, and rebuilt it into one of the premier sports-car tracks in North America. In nineteen ninety-nine Panoz launched the American Le Mans Series, bringing endurance racing back to the United States at international level.

The pharmaceutical millionaire who turned a Georgia crossroads into a racing and wine destination died in twenty eighteen, but Road Atlanta and Chateau Elan still define what Braselton means to the outside world.