A brief history of the Daytona 200 Beach Course and Norton’s total dominance in the famous race.

It’s been more than 60 years since a race was last held there, but should you ever go to Daytona Beach and head south along the sand from the 
high-rise hotels and low-rise bars of the self-styled World’s Most Famous Beach, you’ll eventually come to the distinguishable remains of the old Beach Course, which hosted the running of the Daytona 200-mile race until 1961. In that year, the present-
day Speedway, with its famously steep 31-degree banking, came into operation, leaving the palmetto shrubs on one side, and the rolling Atlantic breakers on the other, to gradually erode a piece of American racing history. 

The Beach Course

First used for motorcycles in 1937, the Beach Course’s North Turn is marked today by a weather-beaten hostelry aptly enough named the Old Timers’ Bar. There’s a cut through the sand dunes on to the road leading down to Ponce Inlet, which — though now largely re-modelled — in some parts still shows traces of the narrow, bumpy tarmac straight along which riders ran flat out for two miles in a southerly direction, along the sand bar dividing the ocean from the Florida Inland Waterway. 

There, they’d slow down before flinging their bikes to the left for the dead flat South Turn out onto the beach, sending up rooster tails of sand as they accelerated wide open out toward the water’s edge where the sand was harder and gave better grip. Then it was north for another two miles, again flat-out in top gear, but this time treading the perilous path between water and land, before slowing once more — though not as much — for the banked North Turn that took them left back onto the tarmac. 

A 4.2 mile (6.75 km) track with only two corners may not sound like much, but as a gruelling test of man and machine it had few equals anywhere in the world as an arduous high-speed challenge, and especially in the postwar era after the demise of Britain’s Brooklands bowl, and the U.S.A.’s board tracks.

The All-Important 
Daytona 200

But it was in those difficult days for European manufacturers after the Second World War that the British motorcycle industry discovered the U.S.A., a vast potential market which for many years provided rich pickings for them. Success in competition, and especially in the crucial Daytona 200, was an important yardstick by which a marque’s excellence was judged, hence the reason that in 1948, Norton’s managing director Gilbert Smith decided to enter a team of specially prepared factory machines…