Tor Kielce: a circuit sharing asphalt with a national road since 1977

On 26 June 1977 three veterans of Polish racing raised the flag on the mast beside the new circuit in Miedziana Góra: Adam Smorawiński, Ksawery Frank and Zdzisław Kałuża, and the opening was performed by Roman Pijanowski, president of the Main Board of the Polish Motor Association. That day the service park stood, out of necessity, on the nearby road. So began the history of a venue that the regional press calls the first car and motorcycle circuit in Poland, which for thirty years hosted the Polish Racing Car Championship and which since 2007 has been waiting for racing to return to the full loop, because a kilometre and a half of that loop is national road no. 74.

Location	Miedziana Góra, Ćmińsk, ul. Wykień 95, Kielce county, on national road no. 74
Type	permanent racing circuit whose big loop includes a section of public road; an oval and a karting track inside
Big loop	4160 m, 16 corners, longest straight 450 m, elevation difference 60 m, partly through forest, partly along the DK74
Small loop (oval)	1140 m
Karting track	880 m, built into the small loop, opened in 1983
Hillclimb course	2780 m (2024 and 2026), 2802 m (2025); start on the straight by the clubhouse, two laps of the oval, finish on the forest section; 277–318 m above sea level, elevation gain 62 m
Opening	26 June 1977, with the second round of the WSMP
Owner and operator	Automobilklub Kielecki
GSMP course record	1:24.164, Michał Ratajczyk, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X, 4 May 2024, course of 2780 m
Main events	WSMP (1977–2007), GSMP (since 2024), Polish Drifting Championship, SuperOES, Kartingowe Grand Prix Toru Kielce
Status	active; the full loop unused in racing since 2007

A flag on the mast, a service park on the road

The inaugural competition was the second round of the 1977 season of the Polish Racing Car Championship, held on 25 and 26 June. In class 1 the entry list carried forty Polski Fiat 126p cars, and among the guests from abroad were the drivers of Trabant 601s from the MC Gotha club in East Germany, Helmut Assmann and Hans Dieter Kessler. Class 1 was won by Zdzisław Kałuża of Automobilklub Kielecki, ahead of Wiesław Cygan and Ksawery Frank. The same Kałuża ended the season as Polish class 1 champion with 146 points, and two more drivers from Kielce, Tomasz Sikora and Jerzy Banach, made the top six. The circuit returned to the calendar as early as October, for the fourth round, and a year later it hosted two of the five championship rounds.

The captions under the archive photographs from the opening stressed that the circuit lies “in an exceptionally picturesque landscape”, and announced that once the venue was expanded there would be room “even for makeshift workshops”. Years later Radio Kielce called that date “momentous in its consequences”: thanks to the circuit Automobilklub Kielecki became a leading centre for organising sporting events, and two WSMP rounds a year became the standard.

The Grand Prix that built the circuit

Automobilklub Kielecki was founded in 1936; after the war it disappeared from the maps and returned to them several times, and it regained legal personality in 1970. In 1972, after Adam Trybus left for a United Nations posting, Włodzimierz Wójcikiewicz took over the presidency and ran the club without a break for 28 years, until 2000. The chronicle written for the club's eightieth anniversary recalls that in the years 1972–1976 its activists were missing “something that was called sport with a capital «S»”. Marcin Chechelski, Andrzej Brodawko, Andrzej Walicki and Ryszard Mikurda proposed an event combining elements of racing and rallying; that is how the Grand Prix Gór Świętokrzyskich was born, which “laid the foundation for building the car circuit in Miedziana Góra”.

The second edition of that event, held from 7 to 9 May 1976, consisted of hillclimbs in Chęciny and on the forest section of today's circuit, plus a street race in Kielce, at the junction of today's Bohaterów Warszawy and Tarnowska streets; an additional attraction was a demonstration run by Andrzej Jaroszewicz in a Lancia Stratos. A year later a circuit already stood on the forest section. According to the club chronicle it was opened a year after work began on the “old”, today “forest” section of national road no. 74 and its connection with the new stretch of the Kielce–Łódź road; a great advocate of the construction was Wójcikiewicz, “who had a gift of persuasion and could gather around himself enthusiasts just like the one he was himself”. The regional press names the Polish Motor Association and works from the Świętokrzyskie region as partners of the undertaking, and Józef Marcinkowski as its designer. The RacingCircuits.info site adds that the goal was a driver training centre that could also host sporting events and promote the region for tourism.

Four kilometres with national road seventy four

The big loop is 4160 m long, running partly through forest and partly coinciding with national road no. 74; the longest straight measures 450 m, the elevation difference is 60 m, and there are sixteen corners. The section of national road forming part of the circuit is a kilometre and a half long. The authors of RacingCircuits.info write of a fast loop in which the forest part has few run-off areas and numerous changes of gradient, “very reminiscent of the Nürburgring Nordschleife”; that is the site's editorial assessment, not a measurement. Marcin Wołczyński, the event director and president of Automobilklub Kielecki, described the venue before the 2024 hillclimb without euphemisms:

The course is located at the technically most difficult venue in this country. It is a difficult venue. That comes from the fact that it has a very particular surface. Slippery, and on top of that the forest section has nothing but blind corners.

Inside the big loop lies the small one, an oval 1140 m long. The Automobilklub states that it is the only oval circuit in Poland and that in 1995 it inaugurated on it, for the first time in the country, the Long Distance Car Race Owal run “to American patterns”; no other sources confirming this race could be found. A karting track 880 m long was built into the oval in 1983. The club's karting section won the Polish team championship three times, and in 1987 the club organised at the circuit the first and, as it writes itself, the last international karting competition; interest then fell, the section ceased to exist, and its graduates Paweł Kałuża, Tomasz Krukowski, Dariusz Stróżyk and Michał Gil moved on to car racing. The karts came back after 22 years: on 24 and 25 July 2009 the fifth and sixth rounds of the Easykart Cup were held here, and on 22 August the Easykart European Grand Finals with 103 competitors.

Rain in June 2007

The last competition of WSMP rank took place at Tor Kielce on 1 and 2 June 2007; the programme included the third round of the KIA Lotos Cup and the fourth rounds of the Grand Prix of Poland, the National Group and the Long Distance Races. The competition was run in rain, it abounded in crashes, and afterwards the venue lost its homologation from the Polish Motor Association. The club chronicle puts it briefly: “A not very successful WSMP event in 2007, and in consequence the need to modernise the circuit”. No money for that modernisation could be obtained, neither from the European Union nor from the Ministry of Sport and Tourism. The club contributed to fitting a second and third rail of the barriers during the modernisation of the national road, and around 2013 (the 2016 chronicle speaks of “three years ago”) it rebuilt almost the whole forest section, which gained a wider surface and new three rail barriers.

It was not the barriers, however, that closed the big loop. Until 2007 the DK74 section was closed for the duration of the races and traffic was sent along village roads; afterwards, as president Krzysztof Tutak explained in 2020, this became impossible because of growing traffic volume and the surrounding streets being unsuited to lorries. Tutak also listed what has to be done besides the bypass: fence the circuit all around, which requires the consent of the State Forests, add a second line of safety barriers at the most dangerous places, install catch fences and viewing points. There was no cost estimate at the time.

The car market, a motel and campsite number 115

The circuit survived those years thanks to trade. In 1981 a car market was set up and the club registered a business activity; the chronicle links this directly with the possibilities of development. The market has operated without a break since 1981, every Sunday from 6:00 to 13:00, on the hardened surface of the circuit, and since 2024 a garage sale has run alongside it. Its character has changed: Tutak said in 2020 that 800 cars used to come and now 80 do, and that the marketplace does not bring in the kind of income the old car market did. Echo Dnia describes this Sunday marketplace as the largest in the Świętokrzyskie region.

The whole complex bears the name Ośrodek Sportowo-Turystyczny „Moto-Raj”. It comprises an administrative building with pit boxes, a motel with 37 beds and campsite no. 115 in a pine forest, with 150 pitches for caravans and 50 tent places. The Polish Motor Association's National Training Centre for Road Rescuers also operates here. In 2000 the Polish road cycling championships were held at the circuit.

The building, whose facade had not been touched for thirty years, underwent thermal modernisation in 2020: the work ran from March to the end of November and cost 1.028 million zloty, of which 65 percent was covered by the European Union; 57 photovoltaic panels with a power of 17.1 kW went up on the roof, and the yellow facade panels were replaced with grey render. The painted signs “Kielce” and “moto-raj” disappeared under the polystyrene, which prompted a reader's letter to the Echo Dnia newsroom; Tutak replied that the old “Tor Kielce” sign had been dismantled and replaced with an illuminated one, and that the old letters would return to the wall on the circuit side.

A hillclimb on a racing circuit

In March 2023, after twenty years of Tutak's presidency, 238 delegates of the general meeting at Targi Kielce elected a new board, and it entrusted the presidency to Marcin Wołczyński from Końskie, the originator and director of the SuperOES series. Wołczyński immediately announced that he wanted the WSMP back, but that “it will not happen immediately”, and that he would start with karting.

He started with a hillclimb. On 3 and 4 May 2024 Tor Kielce hosted the “PGS Wyścig Górski 2024”, the first and second rounds of the Polish Hillclimb Championship; these were the first national championship events at this venue since 2007. The course measured 2780 m: a start on the straight along the clubhouse, two laps of the small loop, entry onto the forest section and a finish in the forest. Seventy three drivers entered, including one from Finland. Michał Ratajczyk in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X won all eight runs he started (out of the ten held), and went down as the first course record holder with a time of 1:24.164; the only longer interruption was forced by the rollover of Karol Piekara's Renault Clio, who got out of it unharmed.

A year later the course was lengthened by 22 m, to 2802 m, by moving the finish, and all eight runs were won by Sebastian Stec in a Ford Fiesta of more than 1000 hp. In 2026 the entry list grew to 106 competitors; the start lies at 277 m above sea level, the finish at 318 m, and the elevation gain is 62 m with an average gradient of 2.30 percent. The hosts took the title of Polish team champion in the 2025 season. Grzegorz Rożalski, European hillclimb champion, explained before the start that “this circuit teaches drivers very well”, because the surface has stretches of better and worse grip. Spectators watch the competition free of charge from zones around the circuit; only the clubhouse terraces are paid for.

In parallel the circuit became a permanent stop of the Polish Drifting Championship: rounds were held here in 2015, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025, among others. Kuba Przygoński, president of the Polish Drifting Federation, claimed in 2023 that competitors reach speeds of up to 180 km/h here while drifting: “Nowhere in Poland do they drive faster”. In 2025 nearly 70 competitors from thirteen countries started in the third round. The circuit also showed its other face: on 2 June 2024, during a practice run before the finals, a 29 year old driver from Hungary went off the track in a Nissan, hit the barriers and was taken to hospital unconscious; the circumstances were investigated by the police.

A track day on the oval

For the amateur driver Tor Kielce is above all the small loop. The club organises Open Track sessions on it: the course runs through the oval and the karting ribbon, any holder of a driving licence or a current competition licence may take part, the entry fee in 2024 was from 200 to 300 zloty, helmets are compulsory in cars with a roll cage and “strongly recommended” in the rest, and whoever damages the infrastructure pays for it. In the calendar for 2026 such sessions appear almost every month, alongside drifting and karting Open Tracks and a practice Open Track before the hillclimb.

The flagship event for amateurs is SuperOES, a circuit criterium devised by Wołczyński some two decades ago: ten rounds a year, with both newcomers and experienced drivers taking part. Tutak spoke in 2020 of a monthly event gathering a hundred cars. The series writes about itself tongue in cheek that it “has already grown to the rank of the Tor Kielce World Championship”. In 2026 the ten rounds of WWTECH SuperOES were spread from 31 January to 24 October, and the season is closed by the December Superbarbórka.

Motorcyclists have their dates too. In June 2024 Automobilklub Śląski ran here the rounds of the Silesian Motorcycle Championship in classes from Open 700 to Mini GP and PitBike, with a separate path for amateurs after training and an examination on the regulations. In August 2024 a motorcycle track day was announced on the whole ribbon of the circuit, in configurations known from the Supermoto and Pitbike championships, with a group for beginners and an instructor holding a PZM licence. The karts came back as well: in May 2025 the second round of the Open Kart Cup was held on the karting track, and the II Kartingowe Grand Prix Toru „Kielce” was planned for 8 and 9 May 2026.

Sixteen kilometres to the full loop

The condition for racing to return to the big loop is the bypass. The S74 expressway on the section from Przełom and Mniów to the Kielce Zachód junction is 16.36 km long; the contract with the Mirbud and Kobylarnia consortium was signed on 9 March 2022, and the investment was planned for the years 2024–2027 under a “design and build” scheme. The first work started in December 2024, the main works in March 2025; the new route follows the line of the current DK74 only for the first 400 m past Przełom, then turns off to the south west. In July 2026 the contractor reported more than 60 percent progress and announced that drivers would take the new road for the 2027 summer holidays. The value of the investment is more than 629 million zloty.

After the S74 opens, the existing road is to serve local traffic, and the Automobilklub hopes that it will then be able to apply to the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways to take over the section along which the circuit runs. Wołczyński said in 2023 that it would then “again be possible to close the fragment belonging to the big loop of the circuit for the duration of the races, as it was in past years”, but he called it a plan “for quite a few years ahead”.

Erwin Surma, a driver who made his debut in the hillclimb at Tor Kielce in 2025, told the TVP3 Kielce camera: “I live literally two kilometres from here, since childhood I have heard the noise of the cars. We even used to come through the forest with the lads on bicycles to look at what was going on here. As soon as I got my driving licence I found myself here”.

Timeline

• 1936: founding of Automobilklub Kielecki.
• 1970: renewed registration of the club; from 1972 Włodzimierz Wójcikiewicz as president.
• 7–9 May 1976: 2nd Grand Prix Gór Świętokrzyskich, with a hillclimb on the forest section of today's circuit.
• 26 June 1977: opening of the circuit; 25–26 June the 2nd round of the WSMP.
• 1981: founding of the car market.
• 1983: opening of the karting track (880 m) in the small loop.
• 1987: the first and last international karting competition.
• 1995: the first long distance race on an oval in Poland (according to the club).
• 2000: Polish road cycling championships at the circuit.
• 1–2 June 2007: the last WSMP round; loss of the PZM homologation.
• July–August 2009: the return of karting, the Easykart Cup and the Easykart European Grand Finals.
• 2020: thermal modernisation of the clubhouse.
• 25 March 2023: Marcin Wołczyński becomes president of the club.
• 3–4 May 2024: the return of the Polish championships, rounds 1 and 2 of the GSMP.
• 1–2 May 2026: 3rd PGS Wyścig Górski Tor Kielce, 106 entries.
• 2027 (planned): handover of the S74 section from Mniów to the Kielce Zachód junction.