The original club, Motocross Club Janslust, ran the fundraiser races annually for more than twenty years. Weather killed the 1982 event. The 1983 financial loss - 6,500 guilders - killed the club. Former members Johan van Dijck, Jan Derikx and Harry Maessen refused to let the racing die. They founded a new private foundation, Stichting Moto-Cross Venray, in 1983, and after the old Heide track owner shut them out, settled at a site in nearby Ysselsteyn beside the Lieutenant General Best Barracks. The first race of the new organization, the international Pullshaw Nederland Trophy in February 1984, drew international riders - Kees van der Ven, the Austrian double world motocross champion Heinz Kinigadner. The 1,500-metre circuit was renamed Circuit de Peel after the surrounding moorland landscape.

When the track lost its licence to host the Motocross World Championship Grand Prix in 1989, Harry Maessen made the decision that defined the rest of his career: he built an oval next to the motocross course. The inaugural oval race ran on 18 August 1990 on a 470-metre concrete loop, with Maessen himself driving in the Super Stock class. The following year, in 1991, Spedeworth - the British organization that runs the brawling, contact-heavy short-oval Superstox class - chose Circuit de Peel for its first Superstox World Championship. The Englishman Darren Innocent took the inaugural title. Asphalt replaced the concrete in the winter of 1995-96. A karting track went into the infield. By 1999 the oval had partnered with the JaBa Circuit elsewhere in Limburg to share championships, and by the early 2000s the circuit had stretched to 520 metres.

Oval racing is a sport that knows what it costs. In August 2005, during the Stockcar F1 World Cup, the Dutch driver Piet Keijzer from nearby Helmond got a flat tyre at speed on the outside lane. He spun, drifted toward the infield, and met the oncoming Englishman Ed Neachell head-on. Keijzer died of his injuries - the only fatal accident in the track's history, awarded the World Cup posthumously. Nine years later, in 2014, another F1 World Cup crash put the Dutchman Theo van Lier into the air ambulance bound for Radboud UMC in Nijmegen, with severe injuries he survived. The British-Continental rivalry that drives the World Cup, year after year, also drives the heaviest accidents at this track.

Circuit de Peel was never actually legal. The municipality of Venray had simply tolerated it for decades on the practical grounds that organized racing was better than illegal motorcycling through the woods. In 1993 the surrounding land was designated part of the Ecologische Hoofdstructuur, a national network of protected nature reserves - which made the track's situation worse, not better, since the new zoning would never have permitted a racing facility. The Ministry of Housing eventually moved against it. Three replacement sites were proposed and rejected. The King's Commissioner of Limburg, Léon Frissen, granted a six-month extension in January 2006. The courts shut it down in 2008. When Maessen tried to build a substitute oval at Oirlo without permission that March, he was ordered to demolish it within a week and complied. An unauthorized kart race held on 16 March drew political fury from the Socialist Party. The old track was filled with containers and demolished in November 2008.

Maessen had already started planning the replacement. In February 2007 he reached an agreement to relocate the circuit across the road from the original complex, an arrangement that required him to buy out a pig farmer for 1.1 million euros while the farmer used 410,000 of that to relocate his pigs. The new quarter-mile oval opened on Whit Monday 2009. For its first two seasons the only major event was the World Cup weekend. Then, over the winter of 2010-11, the half-mile oval was built around the existing short oval - a configuration that gave Venray its current shape, a banked outer track wrapped around a flat inner one, with the two surfaces sharing part of the front stretch. The 2014 season finally brought the track up to seven races a year and added the UK's Pickup Truck Racing Series. The NASCAR Whelen Euro Series followed.

The signature class on the half-mile is the LMV8 Supercup, founded as the successor to the European Late Model Series in 2013. The cars are modern American late models from Lefthander, Tanner, and Howe chassis builders, paired with older ASCAR shells, all running GM crate engines or GM LS1 V8s. Frank Wouters, the 2015 champion, holds the official half-mile lap record, having beaten times set by the NASCAR Whelen Euro Series and Pickup Truck Racing. On the inner oval, the BriSCA Formula 1 and Formula 2 stock cars run their Dutch Tarmac Series rounds in conjunction with the Midland Circuit in Lelystad, with results qualifying for the British World Finals. Spedeworth 2-litre hot rods, ministox, and the BMW 325i Cup fill the calendar. In 2016, Dutch driver Roy Maessen - Harry's nephew - won the Cup F1 main event, the first Dutch winner since 2009. The Maessen name carries this track. It always has.