Brave in the right places.

There is no hiding on a slow track, and there’s even less of it on a fast one. Road America is four-and-a-bit miles of Wisconsin, fourteen corners and four long straights, and it’s one of the fastest road courses anywhere in the world. A lap here is a series of commitments made at very high speed, and the fast corners punish the ones a driver gets wrong.

It’s also one of the oldest road courses in the country. When Wisconsin banned racing on public roads, a highway engineer named Clif Tufte cut four miles of permanent circuit into the farmland outside Elkhart Lake, and it opened in 1955. Endurance racing arrived almost at once: a six-hour Endurathon in 1956, then the Road America 500, a fixture of American sportscar racing from the late fifties on. The prototypes followed. IMSA’s Camel GT cars ran here through the eighties and into the nineties, the American Le Mans Series made it a regular stop through the 2000s, and the current IMSA championship still comes. For seventy years the fastest sportscars in the country have come to Elkhart Lake to race the distance. Now the Zenith field joins that line this July.

Six heavy braking zones punctuate the straights, and the tow a car gets running in the hole another punches through the air, makes Road America one of the great passing tracks in the country. Canada Corner, the downhill stop at the end of one of those runs, is one of the highest-commitment, most punishing passing zones anywhere. The Kink, located just before the straight to Canada Corner, is a fast right-hand corner that separates drivers into those who believe in their machines and those who don’t. The Carousel before it is a long, sweeping right turn that rewards ultimate patience from a driver. It’s all fast, and being fast here means being brave in exactly the right places.

More cars, more closing speed

Round 4 will also be the biggest and most varied grid the Zenith Racing Series has put on track. It introduces the ZR4 class, the slowest tier of cars in the rulebook: touring and home-built cars. Zenith classes its cars by one transparent number, pounds of car per horsepower: 9.0 pounds per horsepower for the ZP2 prototypes, and 12.7 pounds per horsepower for ZR4. That widens the gap between the fastest car on the track and the slowest more than at any point this season to date.

On a four-mile lap with long straights into tight corners, that gap becomes a closing speed, and it’s worst at the braking zones. A touring car has to brake far earlier than a prototype, with less grip and less downforce to haul it down, so it’s already shedding speed while the car behind is still flat in top gear. By the time the prototype arrives it can be closing the gap at seventy feet per second. There’s almost no time to sort the pass out. Introducing a slower class also means more passes and more times being passed for everyone on track. In all, it adds up to more cars and more chaos, and it brings new faces with it, and new drivers and teams the series hasn’t seen before. Four rounds into its inaugural season, the field is still growing rather than settling.

The price of a lap

What changes at Road America is not only the classing, but the price of a mistake. When Zenith applies a lap penalty, the cost of that lap is only ever as large as the lap itself, and a lap here runs solidly over two minutes even for the quickest prototypes in Zenith. The same one-lap penalty is simply worth more time on a longer circuit. A Code 60 works the same way: with the field limited to 60kph, it’s held there over four miles instead of two and a half, so pitting under caution will be even more crucial for strategy.

For this round, there are two of these races to get through. Two starts to time, two strategies to call, twice the opening laps, all of it on the fastest circuit of the year. The speed of the place is what makes it bite. The provisional run sheet is live; the live page tracks it session by session.

Round 4 of Zenith Racing Series runs July 10–12, 2026.