Pocono Raceway: The Tricky Triangle

Just off the highway in Blakeslee sits one of the strangest and most demanding racing circuits in North America: Pocono Raceway, a two-and-a-half-mile triangular speedway that drivers have spent decades alternately loving and fearing.

The project started in April of nineteen sixty-two when a group of Pennsylvania racing enthusiasts began quietly buying up more than a thousand acres in the Pocono Mountains. Construction began in nineteen sixty-five. The full tri-oval opened in nineteen seventy-one and immediately joined the Indianapolis five hundred and the Pocono five hundred in an informal Indy-car triple crown of five-hundred-mile races.

What makes Pocono genuinely unique is that no two of its three turns are alike. The designers drew each corner from a different classic American oval. Turn One resembles Trenton Speedway, banked at fourteen degrees and demanding high entry speed. Turn Two, the tunnel turn, is modeled after Indianapolis Motor Speedway, banking only eight degrees, meaning drivers must brake hard where instinct says stay on the gas. Turn Three borrows its geometry from the Milwaukee Mile, the smallest and tightest of the three, banked just six degrees. The straightaways connecting them vary wildly in length, creating a constantly shifting rhythm that punishes any driver who tries to run the same line lap after lap.

NASCAR arrived early. Richard Petty won the inaugural NASCAR Pocono five hundred in nineteen seventy-four. The track quickly earned the nickname the Tricky Triangle, and sometimes the Bermuda Triangle, because so many championship points leads have evaporated here on a single bad lap.

The mountain setting adds to the drama. Fog rolls in off the Poconos without warning, and the altitude keeps temperatures unpredictable even on summer race weekends. For fifty-plus years Pocono has rewarded preparation and punished complacency.