Nemuno žiedas: Lithuania's only circuit and the house inside the loop

In 2009 “Kauno diena” described the only farmstead that stands inside the Nemuno žiedas loop: it was 11 m from the edge of the plot to the asphalt and 25–30 m from the house, cars and motorcycles went past at speeds of 60 to 250 km/h, and the women who lived there remembered motorcyclists who had once landed in their vegetable garden. The farmstead was older than the circuit: the farm was established in the interwar period, and its cowshed had survived unchanged since 1923. Nemuno žiedas, the “Ring of the Neman”, in the village of Gaižėnėliai near Kačerginė, is the only permanent racing circuit in Lithuania. The story of the house surrounded by asphalt runs through the circuit's history right up to recent years, just like the debts, the disputes over safety and the drives open to anyone who turns up in their own car.

Location	the village of Gaižėnėliai by the small town of Kačerginė, Kaunas District, Lithuania; Kačerginė lies 16 km west of Kaunas, on the left bank of the Neman
Type	permanent racing circuit (loop) for cars and motorcycles; the operator's price list also includes a drift course and a gravel course
Loop length	3.35 km
Terrain	the Makuškė hill, 10.5 m high, called the circuit's calling card
Site area	over 70 ha
First races	early 1960s
Lap record	1:06.337, Gediminas Bakšys, Nissan with a Honda engine, Time Attack round of the Ring Challenge series, 2 August 2025
Owner and operator	the Lithuanian state; since 2020 the circuit has been run by Lietuvos sporto centras, a state budgetary institution
Main events	in the 1960s, rounds of the USSR car and motorcycle racing championships; today rounds of the Baltic car racing championship BaTCC, the Lithuanian championship organised by Ring Challenge and the Baltic motorcycle championship Baltic Superbike
Status	active

Racing through the town

The first course was not a closed circuit. It ran along the highway from Kaunas to Šakiai and through the town of Kačerginė itself, and the sections of public road were closed for the duration of the races. According to the magazine “Za rulom”, which wrote about it as the Neman Ring (Неманское кольцо), the course got its name later, because part of the loop passed through the Neman floodplain. The first races were held here in the early 1960s, and the Lithuanian general encyclopaedia calls the venue the first circuit-racing track in Lithuania.

The championships of the whole Soviet Union soon came here. In autumn 1963 “Za rulom” reported that in the first round of the USSR championship in road-circuit car racing, held on the Neman Ring near Kaunas, 128 drivers competed for a place in the final in Minsk. The ten best in each class went through, and the officials could admit five more. Lithuania fielded 17 competitors, Latvia six. In 1964 the USSR motorcycle championship came here for the first time. The magazine's reporter saw thousands of spectators along the course from various Lithuanian towns, and guests from Belarus, Latvia and Estonia. In the same year the national car championship, with about 150 drivers taking part, began with a round in Kaunas and ended in Leningrad; Muscovite Vladimir Ptushkin became national champion in Formula 3. According to a 2013 article in “Za rulom”, it was he who then set the record for the old loop: 2 min 25 s, an average of 135.31 km/h, at the wheel of a Melkus 63. In 1965 engineer L. Shugurov advised in the same magazine that the first round of the championship be held on the Kaunas course, because it could take a lot of cars at the start, and that the shorter and tighter Leningrad loop be left for the second round.

A loop without the highway

Racing on public roads came at a price. As the number of races grew, so did complaints from Kačerginė residents about the noise, so in 1966 it was decided to build a dedicated loop that used only a section of the Šakiai highway. According to “Za rulom”, racing on the old Neman Ring was stopped in 1967 in connection with a general change of views on the safety of such competitions; from the mid-1970s reconstruction was under way, and by the early 1980s the circuit layout no longer included any public roads.

Another project began in 1987. Nemuno žiedas was to become a complex with three asphalt loops 6.99 km, 3.42 km and 3.27 km long, and inside them there were to be autocross, motorcycle and karting tracks, and even a motoball pitch. That plan was never completed. From 1987 onwards the circuit was only ever repaired in sections. Some of the barriers put up that year were still standing when a new institution took over the circuit in 2016.

The house inside the loop

In the interwar period the farm in Gaižėnėliai belonged to Ona Jablonskytė-Landsbergienė, mother of the politician and professor Vytautas Landsbergis. She took into the farmstead a family which, according to accounts cited by the Delfi portal, looked after the Landsbergis estate; after the Second World War this family stayed on, and the property was registered in its name. The sources do not explain why the farmstead ended up inside the loop when the circuit was laid out. Nearly twenty years before 2020, the resident who had inherited the farmstead from her parents and Vytautas Landsbergis disputed the right to it in court; the dispute, nicknamed the “little cowshed case”, ended with the resident being entered in the register as the owner. Landsbergis sold the undisputed land of his parents to his nephew, and in 2020 the nephew owned the forest, which the loop also surrounds.

The people living in the house had to cross the circuit to get home. The owner of the farmstead sued the shareholders of the circuit's operator and demanded a ban on racing: she wrote about noise, exhaust fumes and danger, citing two incidents in which her property suffered damage of EUR 6,000 and her brother's of EUR 1,700. Courts at both instances dismissed the claim, the last time on 17 March 2020, because it had been brought against the wrong defendants. Arūnas Samochinas, who had just stepped down as head of the circuit's operator, did not deny the problem: “That it is dangerous is a fact. When competitions take place, a security guard is always on duty at the spot where [the owner of the farmstead] lives. But he is there only during competitions, and training takes place on the circuit practically every day.” In January 2018 the circuit's operator and the owner signed a protocol of intent to buy out the farmstead; according to Samochinas, a sum of about EUR 200,000 was agreed, but the transaction never went through.

The solution came after the change of operator. In July 2024 Lietuvos sporto centras announced the end of the long court proceedings over the circuit's barriers, which had begun right after the previous operator's bankruptcy. The announcement names no one, but it speaks of tidying up the area by the “former resident”: the barriers were moved as far from the track as possible and extended by 60 m, and in front of them a new speed-reduction zone was built with tyres that members of the circuit's community had bundled together beforehand. In 2026 the centre's director Linas Tubelis listed the buyout of a private plot by the circuit among the four biggest safety projects: before that, he said, there had been constant trouble with residents crossing the track during races.

Debts and bankruptcy

Until 2016 the circuit was managed by the public institution VšĮ “Nemuno žiedas”, whose sole owner was the state Department of Physical Culture and Sport (KKSD). In 2003 the circuit was inspected by Marcel Martin, an expert from the circuits commission of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), who prepared a 60-page report with recommendations; about two years later he returned and assessed the changes favourably. In 2009 the then director said that half of the circuit had been rebuilt, and the new section widened from 10 to 12 m. His successor in 2013 put the new asphalt at about a kilometre and said it was already cracking. Motorcyclist Šarūnas Pladas, who in the 2009 season also raced in the Polish championship, compared the circuits in Poznań and Brno with Kačerginė at the time: “If we compared the Kačerginė circuit with the ones there, safety at Nemuno žiedas really is in poor condition.” There were cases of cars that went off the track hitting marshals at their posts.

The new management that took over the circuit in 2011 inherited, as director Samochinas said in 2013, a debt to the state budget of 11 million litas, linked to possible crimes from his predecessor's time; the financial crime investigation service and the tax inspectorate were dealing with the case. In 2019 the Lithuanian Court of Appeal found that in 2004–2011 EUR 3,153,982 had been misappropriated from the assets of the circuit's operator, and ordered more than EUR 3 million to be recovered from the director of that time. In 2013 the president of the Lithuanian Automobile Sport Federation (LASF), Gintaras Jonas Furmanavičius, said that too little was being invested in safety infrastructure, so the federation could not issue the circuit a long-term licence and licensed each competition separately.

In 2015 the institution managing the circuit declared bankruptcy because of its debts to the state. On 29 May 2016 LASF inspectors found that the main loop did not meet safety requirements, and the bankruptcy administrator cancelled all events scheduled after 1 June, including three international races. From 5 October 2016 the circuit was run by a new institution, VšĮ “Nacionalinis žiedas”, whose shareholders were the city of Kaunas, Kaunas District and KKSD. It started without the debt of EUR 3.7 million. By the end of 2018 it had obtained a national circuit licence from LASF, and about 1.3 km of new barriers had replaced the old ones from 1987.

The hill that was not dug away

The reconstruction design was prepared by the Lithuanian firm Bendrieji statybų projektai together with the British studio APEX, a circuit designer; by December 2018 it had been approved. The operator wanted a circuit meeting the requirements of an FIA Grade 3 licence, that is, one admitting lesser-known international series. APEX replied that the Stadionas corner would have to be moved deeper into the loop, further from the barriers, and the Makuškė hill, 10.5 m high and the highest point of the circuit, would have to be dug away. After consultations with the shareholders, federations and organisers it was decided that the circuit's uniqueness mattered more than the FIA grading: the whole 3.35-kilometre loop was to be rebuilt to Grade 3, except for the Stadionas and Makuškė sections. Samochinas explained at a press conference in March 2019:

Nemuno žiedas is a unique circuit not only in Lithuania but also in Europe. Such changes in terrain, fast and blind corners simply do not exist anywhere else.

Driver Ramūnas Čapkauskas told LRT that when he raced here in formula cars, very fast Finns and Estonians kept asking him how to drive it, because the bumps and the terrain make it hard to do a lap at the limit here. In 2019 the reconstruction was costed at no less than EUR 10 million. The government agreed that the circuit could be renewed under a concession. No concessionaire was found; even in 2026 a concession was only one of the possible ways of financing. In 2020 the city of Kaunas announced that it would sell its shares and withdraw from the institution. On 13 July 2020, because of financial difficulties, VšĮ “Nacionalinis žiedas” applied to terminate the loan-for-use agreement, and operations at the circuit were taken over by Lietuvos sporto centras, the trustee of this state property since 1 October 2019.

New asphalt and falling records

In September 2023 “Kauno diena” wrote about measurements by experts from the Lithuanian road directorate, according to which 58 per cent of the surface was in poor condition and the rest in satisfactory condition. LASF president Egidijus Janavičius told the paper that motorcyclists get hurt at every competition, because they steer around the holes and cracks with grass growing through them instead of riding the proper line. In 2023 the ministries of education, science and sport and of communications, the Kaunas District municipality and the Lithuanian Association of Technical Sports Federations (LTSFA) signed a memorandum on renewing the circuit. On 11 October 2023 Lietuvos sporto centras signed a contract with the company Kauno tiltai for new asphalt on about 10,000 m² of the circuit; 8 cm of base course and 4 cm of surface course were laid.

Motorcyclists who rode out onto the renewed corners during practice in spring 2024 did not hide their surprise and joy. The work went ahead in stages: barriers in summer 2024, further sections of asphalt and the renovation of one of the buildings in autumn 2025, and in spring 2026 new kerbs, additional energy-absorbing blocks and part of the rise by tower no. 13 dug away to widen the safety zone. In April 2026 circuit representatives said in the operator's announcement: “This season is special for us, because we can finally say that the oldest surface on the circuit is gone.” According to Tubelis, the centre had invested about EUR 2 million in the circuit, of which about 1.7 million went on safety.

On the old asphalt the circuit record stood at 1:09.943: it was set in September 2020 by Arūnas Gečiauskas in a 680 hp Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII. At the end of July 2025, during a BaTCC round, Čapkauskas lapped in a Lamborghini Huracán in 1:07.43, and a week later, on 2 August, Gediminas Bakšys clocked 1:06.337 in a Nissan with a Honda engine in the Time Attack competition of the Ring Challenge series. LRT wrote that the new, even surface finally allows GT cars with strong aerodynamics to drive here. Tubelis had already said in 2024 that some corners would have to be reworked, because the circuit is too fast.

July 2026

On 4 July 2026 a BaTCC round was being held at the circuit. It was raining. On the last lap of the GT division race one of the cars failed to get through the slalom between cones in the slow-down zone and left the track at the site of the former exit from the old part of the course, used as an emergency exit and closed off with a metal gate. Spectators were standing behind the gate, although it was not an official public area. According to the police, the car hit the barriers, and the toppling fence fatally injured a 57-year-old man; his 27-year-old son was taken to hospital. The police opened proceedings over causing death by negligence.

Tubelis repeated that there should have been no spectators at that spot at all. LTSFA president Karolis Ramoška pointed to a joint in the asphalt in the braking zone that throws a car upwards at high speed. Janavičius noted that there are three spectator areas at the circuit; according to LRT, safety during these races was the responsibility of the Latvian company organising the championship. Twelve days later, on 16 July, during a motorcycle practice session open to amateurs and professionals, a motorcyclist born in 1996 fell in the slowest corner of the circuit; he died of his injuries.

In summer 2026 Nemuno žiedas got notice of competition. Jonas Karklys, a driver and the initiator of the Lithuanian Motorsport Park project in Jonava District, announced a 3.3 km circuit compliant with FIA Grade 3 requirements and a first construction phase costing about EUR 30 million. He also explained why he had not invested in Kačerginė: the circuit layout lies at the edge of the site, so widening the safety zones would require felling forest and moving a national road. Janavičius said the same from the federation's side: most of the barriers stand on the site boundary, and the state has no additional land around the circuit.

In your own car over Makuškė

For a driver off the street, Nemuno žiedas has been open for years. In July 2014 “Kauno diena” announced an Auto Moto Track Day here, during which any owner of a motorcycle or car could lap the circuit; cars had the track to themselves from 17:00 to 21:00, and participants had to come with helmets and roadworthy cars. In 2018 LRT wrote that anyone who turns up in their own car and pays a symbolic fee can take a drive on the circuit. Racing driver Gediminas Zabotkus advised at the time increasing speed gradually, because at high speed there are no small mistakes; together with the circuit team he urged people to come wearing a helmet.

Today regular drives for amateurs are organised by, among others, Slalomo akademija in the #TrackdayLT series. For the season-closing open track on 10 October 2026, three hours of driving cost from EUR 119 to 169, depending on the registration date, and training for novices, who are first led and taught by an instructor, from EUR 59 to 79. The price is per car, not per person, so the number of drivers of one car is not limited. The organiser provides two configurations: A has one braking zone, on the start straight, and B three, including before the corners called Stadionas and Šakiai. A helmet for car or motorcycle sport, non-synthetic clothing covering the whole body and a technically sound car are required; timing is compulsory for safety reasons, but results can be hidden on request. Passengers may only be carried in cars with a roll cage, and spectators enter free of charge and watch the driving from the stands by the start and inside the loop, by the Ąžuolas corner.

In winter amateurs race here in the Nemunring Winter Games series. In the sprint you drive the whole loop with cones in the slow-down zones: a demonstration run and four timed runs. The regulations allow only roadworthy production and sports cars on winter tyres compliant with the road traffic rules, without studs or slicks, and at most two participants per car; the 2026/27 season starts on 13 December. Tėvas Racing, where from 1 April to 1 November customers drive the company's cars around the circuit themselves under an instructor's supervision, also provides an instructor for drives in a private car, on prior booking. The Lithuanian championship is a different league: classification in Time Attack in the Ring Challenge series requires an annual LASF category C licence. The whole circuit can also be hired from Lietuvos sporto centras, in summer for EUR 200 an hour from Monday to Thursday and EUR 300 from Friday to Sunday; the booking must be made at least four working days in advance.

This openness was best seen on the day the circuit celebrated its half-century. On 30 September 2012, after the official speeches, everyone who had come in their own car was invited onto the loop. The first to reach the finish was KKSD director general Klemensas Rimšelis, in a Pobeda. He said he had driven here before, in winter, to get used to a slippery road: “It's important, even for me, because once in winter I happened to fly off an embankment.”

Timeline

• Early 1960s: first races on a loop running along the highway from Kaunas to Šakiai and through the streets of Kačerginė.
• 1963: first round of the USSR championship in road-circuit car racing on the Neman Ring, 128 drivers.
• 1964: first round of the USSR motorcycle championship in Kaunas; Vladimir Ptushkin's record for the old loop, 2 min 25 s.
• 1966: decision to build a dedicated loop that uses only a section of the highway.
• 1987: project for a complex with three loops, never completed; installation of barriers, about 1.3 km of which were replaced with new ones by the end of 2018.
• 2003: inspection by FIA expert Marcel Martin.
• 2015: bankruptcy of VšĮ “Nemuno žiedas”.
• 2016: 29 May, LASF inspection and cancellation of events; 5 October, VšĮ “Nacionalinis žiedas” takes over the circuit.
• 2019: reconstruction design without digging away the Makuškė hill.
• 2020: 13 July, Lietuvos sporto centras takes over operations at the circuit; 20 September, record by Arūnas Gečiauskas, 1:09.943.
• 2023: memorandum on renewing the circuit; from October, new asphalt on about 10,000 m².
• 2025: 2 August, lap record by Gediminas Bakšys, 1:06.337.
• 2026: in April the operator announces the end of the oldest surface; 4 July, death of a spectator during a BaTCC round.