This is the first I’m hearing about it, lol;
For years in the 1960s and early ’70s, Watkins Glen was home to the most infamous piece of real estate in racing, a mud bowl outside the track known as The Bog. Denizens of The Bog, known as Bogladytes, would drag old vehicles to The Bog, throw rocks at them and then set them on fire.
From Reddit:
Essentially, people played this game where they’d take any car, any car at all, and try to drive it through this big mud pit. Those who weren’t successful got a 6 pack of beer, but it was the failures that were the real cause for celebration - the crowd would bash the vehicle, hit it with rocks, axes, you name it, and then set it on fire. It became something of a yearly tradition. They’d set Magnesium engine blocks on fire. And they’d burn every car. They’d steal cars from the lot and bog them and light em up. Nothing was safe, not even a Greyhound bus: at the 1974 US F1 Grand Prix; one was driven into the mud pit, crashed, and burned with Molotov cocktails. After it burned, they hacked its fuel tank open, and continued to burn 12 cars. The record for one event was more than 51 cars destroyed, some of them brand new, which is pretty impressive. And it was a yearly tradition, they bogged vehicle after vehicle and the ones that didn’t make it were destroyed and burned by the crowd. It sounds like an epically fun time.
that sounds awesome.
I spoke to someone recently, maybe even at Watkins Glen vintage, who was there. Someone I know, I just can’t remember who. Supposedly the bus wasn’t even theirs, it was just a bus greyhound or whomever had used to transport people to the track. Someone stole it from a different part of the infield and drove it to the bog
