The FIRM

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The FIRM is the Florida International Rally and Motorsport Park, more than 400 acres of varied ground outside Starke. It runs a European-style rally school and a road course, and it is used for advanced driver education as well as by a special forces and security training academy. Companies take it for events, team building, media days and vehicle testing. For an ordinary visitor the way in is an Open Track Day: you bring your own vehicle and drive one of the courses yourself. There is also a karting circuit, put in during the early 2000s, more than twenty miles of off-road rally trail, and a firing range covering a full circle. The ground has a history: it was built in 1942 as Crystal Lake Army Airfield, later renamed Keystone Army Airfield, and during the Second World War it held a strategic reconnaissance school. It passed to the City of Keystone Heights in 1947 for private flying. Ivor Wigham, a British rally driver, opened the European Rally School here in 1998 and cut about seven miles of wooded trail to run it on. The Strategic Group of Gainesville bought the place in 2012 and renamed it The FIRM. The road course was laid in 2008 at a cost of two million dollars: 1.6 miles and ten turns, among them a lightly banked double-apex curve onto the main straight, plus an optional four-turn section. It sits about eight miles south of Starke, near Keystone Heights, on Airport Road