Westwood was not developed by a corporation or a municipality. The Sports Car Club of British Columbia built it and ran it, on provincial crown land leased on the southern slopes of Eagle Mountain - Eagle Ridge, to everyone who lived nearby. Construction started in 1957 and took two years.

What opened in the summer of 1959 was 1.8 miles of road course, 2.897 kilometres, with eight turns threaded into a hillside that did the work a flat site could not. Canada had raced on airfields and closed public roads before. It had never had a permanent track designed from the ground up for the purpose. That the country's first one came from a club of amateurs on the west coast, rather than from the industrial money in Ontario, says something about how motorsport actually grows: someone has to want it enough to move the dirt.

For a small circuit at the far edge of the continent, Westwood drew a startling roster. The Formula Atlantic series raced there from 1971 to 1990, a nineteen-year relationship that outlasted almost everything else on the schedule. NASCAR's Winston West Series came in 1973 and 1974. The Trans-Am Series ran from 1977 to 1980. The Player's GM Challenge Series arrived in 1987 and stayed until the end.

Formula Atlantic in those years was where North American open-wheel careers were made, and the names that passed through Westwood read like a proof of that. Gilles Villeneuve, before Ferrari. Keke Rosberg, before the Formula One world championship. Bobby Rahal and Danny Sullivan, both of whom would win the Indianapolis 500. Michael Andretti, at the start of a long career. They came to a track built by weekend volunteers and raced it flat out.

The circuit's largest audience never set foot in Coquitlam. On 12 December 1988, MacGyver aired an episode called "Collision Course," filmed principally at Westwood, with the Player's GM Challenge Series running behind the plot. On screen the place was renamed Westwood Springs Race Course, which is the kind of small indignity location shoots visit on real towns.

Millions of people watched cars run those eight corners that night without knowing where they were. It was late in the track's life - barely two years from the end - and there is something fitting about the circuit reaching its widest audience disguised as somewhere else, just before it stopped existing altogether.

Land on a mountainside twenty-five kilometres from downtown Vancouver, held on a lease, in a region running out of buildable ground: the outcome was never really in doubt. Westwood closed in 1990. The Westwood Plateau housing development went up on the site, and the Westwood Plateau Golf & Country Club took much of the rest.

The name survived, which is what usually survives. Residents who bought into the plateau live at an address that commemorates a racetrack most of them never saw, and the golfers walking the ninth have no particular reason to know what is under the grass. But the hillside has not changed shape. The same slope that gave the club its elevation change still falls away south toward the Fraser Valley, and on a clear day you can stand up there and see most of the reason the track was worth building - and most of the reason it could not stay.