I was the Motorcycle Hall of Fame biographer for nearly a decade. I had the honor of writing most of the short bios on the Hall’s website. One track that kept coming up time and again as the most feared, most challenging on man and machine was the Langhorne Mile.
You could hear the shudder in the voice of legends like Joe Leonard and Everett Brashear when they talked about Langhorne.
What was so unique about “The Horn”? Simple, it had no turns… or more accurately it was one big left turn with its circular shape.
The fastest riders were turning laps right at 100 mph, and this was in the 1950s. By comparison a record lap at the Springfield Mile during the same period was about 87 mph.
The top riders report being in a drift nearly the entire 100 miles of the race. To ride on that edge was grueling and many riders simply weren’t up to the task.
I know a lot of current race fans scratch their heads when I write about stuff so far in the past, but like I said, so many riders of the ‘40s and ‘50s had so much to say about Langhorne I thought it was worth trying to tell the story of this infamous racetrack.
— Larry Lawrence
The legendary, some say infamous, Langhorne Speedway.
Rider Files 
We used to have a lot of motorcycle racing in Pennsylvania. Most of the tracks, like Windber were really not up to the task but, now we’ve got next to nothing. What the heck happened ?
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I thought Bedford was a cool old track. Unfortunatlety not enough fans showed up. It didn’t help that it was raining all around that night.
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Awesome story! Langhorne sounds like a truly brutal track, one that was indeed overcome by advancing technology: bikes, tires and riders got better and safety became a major concern. But I hate it when tracks go away. When I was a little kid, never really understood the Joni Mitchell song, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ that stated, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” I understand it now. Shopping centers and subdivisions are the enemy of race tracks.
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Thanks for posting this. I can’t imagine sliding a bike at 100 mph continuously, shoulder to shoulder with other racers, for an hour! Guts and stamina!
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And to think, I’d get dizzy going through the carousel at Road America. I’d be done after a couple of laps at this place.
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Built right in the middle of a subdivision— yeah that could happen today.
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Ed,
That photo was from the early 1950s. The track was actually there before the sub-division, but for sure, once the neighborhoods came in it was only a matter of time before the track would go.
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I’m a bit of old timer having attended my first Motorcycle road race at O.C.I.R. in 1968,saw a flat track race earlier that year in Vegas but wasn’t as taken in by what I saw at O.C.I.R.
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You’d have to be at least in your late 60s to remember the motorcycle races at Langhorne. And that’s if you were taken there as a child.
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