Circuit de Mirecourt: a track beside a NATO airfield and a noise row

The decision was taken on 8 May 1952 by Montel, the Secretary of State for Air: a NATO air base was to be built north of Mirecourt in the Vosges. Farmers from Juvaincourt protested as soon as they heard of it, but the airfield was built, although no unit was ever permanently stationed there. Almost seventy years later banners appeared again on its edge. About twenty opponents, local residents and environmentalists, protested against a track for cars and motorcycles, which today, as Circuit de Mirecourt, receives drivers on a loop 3.75 km long.

Location	Aéropôle Sud Lorraine, communes of Juvaincourt and Puzieux, Vosges department, Grand Est region; next to Épinal-Mirecourt airport
Site	about 40 ha, partly a former aircraft parking apron
Length	3.75 km
Width	11 m, 13 m on one section
Homologation	June 2023: track days for cars and motorcycles faster than 200 km/h; as of July 2023 no competitions
Facilities	27 garages, 1.5 ha paddock, control tower with video monitoring and light signals
Season	track closed from 1 January to 14 February
Owner and operator	Circuit de Mirecourt company, the Levorato family
Status	active; in August 2026 bookings into 2027

Daisies on the plateau

A survey of the area identified about six places in the Vosges where the base could be built. Three lay around Mirecourt, roughly in the middle of the department, and the one chosen was not the one the engineers of the state roads and bridges service, Ponts et Chaussées, had put first. About 320 ha of fertile land was expropriated for the airfield, including roughly 30% of the commune of Juvaincourt and land belonging to four other villages; that is why people in the area spoke of the “Juvaincourt base”, although officially it was called Mirecourt. This is how Pierre Labrude describes these events; he reconstructed the history of the base from military and departmental archives and from the press of the time. Not only farmers protested. At the nearby Ravenel psychiatric hospital people feared almost constant noise and, in case of war, bombing. Montel ordered simulated takeoffs and landings and did not change his decision, and the engineers moved the base away from the villages, dropped one of the two taxiways and turned the runway slightly.

On 9 March 1953 the base land was handed over to a group of firms from Mirecourt, among them the company Cracco. Despite strikes and bad weather, the work was finished in the summer, a few weeks ahead of schedule, for a little over 3.15 billion francs of the time. The runway met the NATO standard: 2400 m long and 45 m wide. Aircraft were to wait on dispersal pads called “marguerites”, that is daisies; the NATO standard provided for three such pads of 17 or 18 stands each.

A year later the plans changed. On 29 July 1954 the NATO infrastructure committee downgraded Mirecourt to the role of a reserve airfield, so not a single masonry building was erected, and the parking apron along the runway was not built at all. According to the operator of today's airport, until 1966 it was used in NATO exercises mainly by Canadian aircraft stationed at Grostenquin in Moselle. Labrude considers September 1958 the most important episode: from 3 to 23 September two Canadian squadrons of F-86 Sabre fighters were based here, because the runway at Grostenquin was being refurbished, and the personnel lived in tents.

After France left NATO's integrated command structures, the base passed under the authority of the military air force, which had no use for it. On 4 December 1967 Prime Minister Pompidou handed it over to civil aviation, with the mission of becoming the department's main airport. From 1 August 1968 it was run by the chamber of commerce and industry in Épinal. Labrude wrote in 2014 that only the daisies and fragments of fences still recall its military origins.

Porsches on the taxiways

The civil airfield also got used to engines of another kind. The operator made it available to car manufacturers: a meeting of BMW Z3 owners took place here, and a Porsche weekend with a presentation of the 911 model, during which people drove along the taxiways as on a track. As the last motorsport events at the airfield the operator lists European Drift 2008 and the Drag Power Show. In 1987–1988 a duty-free zone was laid out next to the airfield, today the Aéropôle Sud Lorraine. In 2000, on the initiative of the Mirecourt commune community, a kart track was built there, and in 2009 a supermoto track 1753 m long was added, with an asphalt and an earth section.

In 2006 the kart track was bought by Pierre and Damien Levorato, father and son. The company that ran it was called Free Kart 88. Pierre, an engineer by training, in 2019 chaired the karting league of the Grand Est region, and Damien specialised in large public works projects. In July 2023 the father told Endurance24 how the idea began:

“This track came about a bit out of necessity. We own a kart track, but my son found it in the end a bit banal and we told ourselves we would change scale. The project to buy an existing track did not work out, so we moved to the free land next to our kart track, on a former NATO military base”.

A kart track sold to pay for construction

In April 2019 the newspaper “Vosges Matin” described the track as one of the main investments at the Aéropôle: a loop of 3.7 km on 40 ha, comparable in size to the track at Le Castellet. Pierre Levorato counted EUR 3.5 million for the loop alone and about EUR 700,000 for the later facilities, announced an opening in July 2020, around ten jobs to begin with and a hotel nearby, and put racing off until later: “for now organising races is not a priority, we'll see”. The layout of the loop was to be drawn by Damien. To close the financing, the Levoratos sold the kart track. It was bought by the Belgian Frank Cancelli, a karting driver who for nearly three decades had competed in the French, European and world championships; in the trade register the buyer is the company Idéal Kart France, of which he is president. In September 2019 Free Kart 88 changed its name to Circuit de Mirecourt, with Pierre as president and Damien as managing director. A year later Pierre explained that they wanted to create a place where speed enthusiasts can let off steam “without risk to their driving licence points”, and at the same time a track where big teams would fine-tune the set-up of their cars and manufacturers would test new models before launch. In 2023 Endurance24 estimated the whole project at EUR 6 million.

Twenty cars above Domvallier

In spring 2020 the project was assessed by the regional environmental authority MRAe Grand Est. Its opinion of 11 May 2020 describes a plot with two faces: in the north-western part lay a disused aircraft parking apron, in the south-eastern part a cultivated field that about ten years earlier had still been part of a forest. The project provided for 4.9 ha of asphalt surface for the track and car parks, a reception building, a workshop, paddock garages and earth embankments 2–6 m high.

The nearest houses stood 800 m from the track, in Domvallier. The background noise in the village, when karts were not running, was 42 dBA, roughly the level of a quiet office, and the regulations allowed the track to raise it by 6 dBA at most. The acoustic study showed that this limit is reached when 20 vehicles are running at once at the least favourable point of the loop; with 30 vehicles the limit was reached by Puzieux, and in Domvallier the rise in noise reached 7.5 dBA. The authors judged the risk to be small, because in normal driving the cars spread out over the whole loop, and MRAe accepted this part as satisfactory. It did, however, recommend calculating the emissions more precisely and proposing compensation for them, installing settling tanks or retaining the first rainwater from the track before it soaks into the ground, surveying the wildlife around the track and assessing the impact of noise on birds.

The public consultation (enquête publique) ran from 28 September to 28 October 2020. The commissioner in charge, Jacky-René Lajoux, received about ten people at his office hours and got ten letters. Denis Lamarche, the former mayor of Domvallier, raised his doubts at that time. He later coordinated the “Coupe-circuit” collective (literally: circuit breaker), which was supported by the association Vosges Nature Environnement. On 7 January 2021 about twenty activists stood in the duty-free zone in Juvaincourt with banners reading “Incoherent project”, “Illegal construction” and “Champions of CO2 and decibels”, and they called the whole idea a “political, environmental and economic aberration”. According to Vosges Nature Environnement the investor estimated the track's emissions at 182 t of CO2 a year and the opponents at nearly 500 t, not counting spectators' travel; the association also counted about 2500 residents of the surrounding villages and nearly 35,000 m³ of rainwater running off the asphalt each year. Pierre Levorato replied that he had begun the procedures with the regional environment directorate DREAL, with MRAe and with the regional health agency in late 2018, that all had given favourable opinions, and announced three noise sensors that would limit the cars to 96 decibels.

The planning permission was registered on Friday 22 January 2021. In April the opponents filed a request with the prefecture to revoke the permits signed by the mayors of Puzieux and Juvaincourt. In December “Vosges Matin” wrote of two complaints from nature protection associations, on which a decision was awaited in the coming months, and the weekly “Le Canard enchaîné” also took up the dispute. “Vosges Matin” recalled in this context the vote of internet users held on its website in 2020: 1517 votes for the track, 135 against, 55 undecided. As late as June 2023 the chairman of Vosges Nature Environnement, Jean-François Fleck, called the homologation “an irresponsible decision” and hoped that a court ruling would stop the track's operation in the coming months. How these cases ended could not be established. The track operates.

One and a half million cubic metres

Construction went on in parallel with the dispute. In February 2021 old concrete was being crushed at the site, to go into the loop's foundations. According to “Vosges Matin”, Damien Levorato's crew moved one and a half million cubic metres of soil, rubble and stone over four years and built the subgrade almost entirely from recycled material, extracted from successive layers of the site; at the end only the asphalt and the stones for the gravel traps were added. The garages and the control tower were built as a timber structure, from fir from the Vosges and the Jura; in summer 2022 they were ready, with a delay caused by the pandemic and material shortages. In early November 2022 the company Colas laid a bituminous base layer over the entire 3.75 km in three days, and in February 2023 the spreading of topsoil over 30 ha was being finished, ahead of spring grass sowing.

The opening date kept moving: from July 2020 to spring 2022, then to autumn 2022 and to spring 2023. The ceremony set for 11 May 2023 was postponed by a month, because the opening commission demanded a few minor corrections. According to the track's statement, the homologation officials came on 19 April and set additional requirements that had to be met before the first track days. Pierre Levorato explained later that the national commission for speed circuits CNECV, which operates under the interior ministry, ordered work interrupted by bad weather to be finished, and at the first visit did not issue the homologation.

The delay cost the track its first competition. The Ultimate Cup Series racing series, which in October 2022 had entered Mirecourt in its calendar for 1–3 September 2023 as the first car event on the new loop, moved the round to Estoril in May 2023. The prefecture's green light came on Tuesday 27 June 2023, after CNECV's approval. Damien Levorato, the company's managing director, told the newspaper that customers from Belgium and France had already been waiting for the homologation.

The ministerial approval of 2023 covered vehicles faster than 200 km/h, but only track days, not competitions; for racing homologation, barriers of about 17,000 tyres were needed, among other things, which manufacturers, as Pierre Levorato said, supplied “drop by drop”. In the last days of June about ten motorcyclists on big machines went out onto the loop. In October 2023 Porsche clubs from Lorraine, Alsace and Burgundy-Franche-Comté brought about 40 cars to the track. The official inauguration was held only on 28 March 2024 by the firm RC Events, which has settled in beside the track; those who came included Nathalie Babouhot, chair of the Mirecourt-Dompaire commune community, and the mayor of Mirecourt, Yves Séjourné.

Two Saturdays in August

The summer of 2024 brought two deaths. On Saturday 10 August at about 11:30 a motorcyclist from Goetzenbruck in Moselle was killed. According to preliminary findings, coming out of a corner he ran into the motorcycle ahead of him, fell and hit his head on the ground, and resuscitation failed. A week later, on 17 August, during a weekend of private riding, a 44-year-old motorcyclist from Belgium died. “Vosges Matin” wrote of a tragic series and noted that the circumstances of the first accident were still not entirely clear, and that the track's managers pay very close attention to safety.

In autumn 2025 the same newspaper described how rescue works: about thirty cameras watch the loop, and in the event of an accident the supervisor in the control tower calls a rescuer, who sets off at once in an ambulance. “In case of an accident we intervene within the vital time of three minutes” was the title of an interview with Didier, an anaesthetic nurse who often serves at the track's medical post. He said there are far more interventions with motorcycles than with cars, in which few are injured, because impacts are cushioned by the sand traps.

Calendar to 2027

In October 2025 the track was booked up to the end of 2026, and in a conversation with the newspaper the owners explained its success by its closeness to the borders with Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg and by good road access. In August 2026 the calendar was full into 2027, the homologation had been renewed, and motorcycle riding clearly outweighed car riding.

A driver with his own car gets here through organisers working with the track; a regular partner is Maxime Antoine's Drive Académie. According to a “Vosges Matin” account, at its days all cars run together, from production cars to sports cars, except single-seaters. For 10 and 11 October 2026 the organiser sold places for EUR 240–550, depending on the variant, with third-party liability insurance included; a second driver cost EUR 80 more. The briefing started at 8:30. On the first day the pit lane was open throughout the riding (open pit lane), from 9 to 12 and from 14 to 18, and on the second day the cars ran in 20-minute sessions, interleaved with sidecar motorcycle sessions. A helmet, a towing eye and a driving licence or a licence were required. Only adults could drive, passengers could be people aged 16 and over, and electric cars were not admitted.

In September 2026 a day with an open pit lane was also run here by Auto Racing Trackday, for EUR 300 and with an instructor on request. The operator opens the loop for track days from 15 February to 31 October, from 9 to 12 and from 13:30 to 18, with shorter hours in November and December. Motorcyclists are trained by Pist.A, and CD-Sport runs courses in Formula 4 single-seaters.

In July 2023 Pierre Levorato still gave himself two or three years for corrections and finishing the track. Three years later, on Saturday 15 August 2026, 120 drivers from Germany were running on the loop at the edge of the former NATO base, which the newspaper regarded as ordinary attendance given the bookings for the coming months.

Timeline

• 1952: 8 May decision to build a NATO base near Mirecourt; protest by farmers from Juvaincourt.
• 1953: construction of the airfield with a runway of 2400 by 45 m.
• 1954: 29 July downgrade to the role of a reserve airfield.
• 1958: from 3 to 23 September two Canadian F-86 Sabre squadrons from Grostenquin.
• 1967: 4 December airfield handed over to civil aviation.
• 1987–1988: duty-free zone by the airfield, today Aéropôle Sud Lorraine.
• 2000: kart track in Juvaincourt.
• 2006: the Levoratos buy the kart track.
• 2019: sale of the kart track; the track project described in the press.
• 2020: 11 May MRAe opinion; from 28 September to 28 October public consultation.
• 2021: 7 January protest by the “Coupe-circuit” collective; 22 January planning permission; in April a request to revoke it.
• 2023: 27 June homologation, first runs at the end of June.
• 2024: 28 March official inauguration; 10 and 17 August deaths of two motorcyclists.
• 2026: booking calendar full into 2027.