It’s not every day that lawyers get to pave the way for the phrase so beloved by racing enthusiasts: Gentlemen, start your engines.
Stites & Harbison partner and car buff Bill Mathieu, along with partner Allen Bradley and counsel Richard Flexner, are among the few. In September, Mathieu helped his client, Atlanta Motorsports Park, close a nearly $2 million deal to buy 153 acres near Dawsonville—land slated to become a new, members-only performance-vehicle driving club.
The land itself even has a racing pedigree: AMP, as Atlanta Motorsports Park is known, purchased the acreage from EHK Investments, a company affiliated with racecar driver Bill Elliott’s brother, engine-builder Ernie Elliott. Mathieu represented AMP in the closing, while Flexner and Bradley handled financing and organizational structuring issues. Dawsonville attorney Shelly Townlee Martin represented EHK.
Though the environment in which the deal closed was hardly conflict free—a suit in Dawson County Superior Court raises nuisance and zoning challenges—plans for the AMP are ambitious and moving forward quickly.
Mathieu said the park could open as soon as spring of 2010, and that it would be the first facility of its kind in this part of the country.
He analogized the AMP to a golf club for car lovers. “It’s not a racetrack. You won’t see competitive events like the Petit Le Mans,” he said, contrasting the planned park with Road Atlanta, which hosted the Petit Le Mans over the weekend. “Likely AMP will never have anything like that. If you have a high-performance vehicle and need a place to legally enjoy it at speed, this gives you an opportunity to drive your vehicle as it was meant to be driven.”
The park is slated to have a more than two-mile track with at least six course configurations designed by Formula 1 track designers, the German architectural and engineering firm Tilke GmbH; a .79 mile track for karts; facilities for motorcycles; garages; a restaurant; and a racing school with Skip Barber as its consultant.
And—in a twist that is hardly usual for a venue focused on gas-powered vehicles—the track and its amenities are slated to be environmentally friendly.
“The idea is to make the track as green as possible,” Mathieu said. “It may make up front costs higher, but it will make operating costs lower in the long run.”
He said other lawyers at his firm are gearing up to help AMP garner energy tax credits for a planned solar farm. Other plans include using reclaimed rainwater for irrigation and flush toilets; solar-powered fans for interior air movement; and LEED certification for some buildings.
Mathieu said the $1,939,772 purchase price of the land was paid for in part by track memberships—which in the pre-construction phase range from $8,000 to $40,000, not including monthly fees; investor funding and some seller financing.
He estimated that total land, track and immediate improvement costs will run between $6 million and $8 million.
Speaking in the context of the troubled economy, Mathieu said the land-purchase deal comes at an “almost unprecedented time in the history of the real estate business, especially here, with Atlanta being such a commercial real estate town. This is exciting and, I guess, fairly unusual.”
Similar parks do exist in other parts of the country, he said, citing the Autobahn Country Club in Joliet, Ill., and the VIRrginia International Raceway in Alton, Va., as examples.
He said the idea of a membership track “is one of the things whose time has come for a number of reasons. One of the big things is automobiles have gotten so good, with the quality of tires and brakes and stability systems. They’re quick, and they’re way too quick to drive anywhere near the limits on the street. Plus, it’s illegal.”
This track, with what Mathieu calls its impressive elevation changes—it will be built on land even hillier than the Road Atlanta course—will even have a curve designed to mimic the Eau Rouge on the Spa Francorchamps course in Belgium.
“The theme is very similar to a long, sweeping, gradual incline up a hill, you’re turning practically the entire time,” he said, his enthusiasm for the sport evident. “Plus the radius of your turn will change repeatedly. … Originally, the Eau Rouge was a huge, long straight. Lately they’ve added a kink, called a chicane, to slow people down. This will look more like the original than the original.”
Mathieu said he has yet to ink his own membership at AMP. But, he said, it’s only a matter of time: “Being a real estate attorney, I’ve got some real estate investments that are not doing so well, but if I can get out of them, I’ll join. I’m a car junkie.”