The Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park is a 600-acre racing complex operating since 1983 in Maricopa County, just outside Phoenix, Arizona. The track runs in flat land on the Salt River Valley desert, so a good pair of sunglasses are a top priority for racing in Wild Horse, with 300 sunny days per year on average and no obstacles to block the horizon in most of the track. The asphalt surface remains dry 90% of the time, as it rarely rains in the Valley of the Sun. The complex includes a drag strip, an off-road course, several road courses, and even the artificial Firebird Lake, a home for water skiing in the heart of Arizona.
There are several race track layouts in the Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park: the 1.25-mile (2.01-km) East Circuit, the 1.1-mile (1.77-km) West Circuit, and the 2.5-mile (4.02-km) Mondo Circuit. The East Circuit sits between the Firebird Lake and the Maricopa freeway, with ten turns and several straightaways intermingled with chicane-like sections. The West Circuit sits at the other side of the lake and is suitable for clockwise or counterclockwise racing. The Mondo Circuit incorporates the drag strip as its front straight and covers the lengthiest trajectory among all the configurations, going through 23 turns with different angles and alternating steering directions.
The Eastern road course at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park has an average speed of 68 miles per hour (109 kilometers an hour), on an average lap time of 1:06.3. The track is short and hard to accelerate on, with tight angles in corners one and four and several chicanes-style features between turns two and three, five to seven, and eight to ten. Racers need to master how they enter and exit every curve to get the most out of this circuit.