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Alan Wilzig

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EXCLUSIVE: ***NO NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, NO NEW YORK TIMES, NO NEWSDAY*** Some homeowners plant elaborate gardens. Others splurge on tennis courts or swimming pools. Alan Wilzig prefers something a bit racier. In the backyard of his 150-year-old Dutch Colonial-style home in the Hudson Valley town of Taghkanic, he has built a 1.15-mile-long, 40-foot-wide, bidirectional racetrack — heavy on the hairpin turns and smooth as a billiard table — designed for high-performance motorcycles and cars. “You’re going fast enough to make your ass pucker,” Wilzig, 52, told The Post. “The f– ing hairs on your neck stand up.” The lobster-claw-shaped course is the only personal-use, professional-quality private racetrack in the world, according to Wilzig. It boasts nine turns, 80 feet of elevation changes, grass-covered boundaries and FoamAir fences outside the corners to soften the impact of going off course. (There have been four accidents on the track but no injuries.) Wilzig, who once made headlines for having co-owned a castle in Water Mill, LI, with his brother Ivan, describes the track as a “field of dreams for motor sports.” The impetus for it came in the late 1990s after a motorcycle-riding buddy in the Hamptons nearly got killed by an automobile; the idea of street-riding became increasingly unappealing to Wilzig. “After 100,000 miles of around-the-world motorcycle-riding without incident,” he said. “I realized it was only a matter of time before somebody pulled out in a fancy car and hit me.” Wilzig financed his property purchase with cash from the sale of the Trust Company of New Jersey bank in 2004. Long controlled by Wilzig’s father, Siggi B., who died in 2003, it went for $726 million. In 2005, Alan took his cut of the profits and bought the 275-acre spread upstate for $3.35 million. “I bought this property with the intention of building a racetrack,” said Wilzig, who served as the bank’s CEO and now focuses primarily on philanthropy.

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Contained in galleries
Alan Wilzig has a museum - 27 NOv 2017
EXCLUSIVE: ***NO NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, NO NEW YORK TIMES, NO NEWSDAY*** Some homeowners plant elaborate gardens. Others splurge on tennis courts or swimming pools. Alan Wilzig prefers something a bit racier. In the backyard of his 150-year-old Dutch Colonial-style home in the Hudson Valley town of Taghkanic, he has built a 1.15-mile-long, 40-foot-wide, bidirectional racetrack — heavy on the hairpin turns and smooth as a billiard table — designed for high-performance motorcycles and cars. “You’re going fast enough to make your ass pucker,” Wilzig, 52, told The Post. “The f– ing hairs on your neck stand up.” The lobster-claw-shaped course is the only personal-use, professional-quality private racetrack in the world, according to Wilzig. It boasts nine turns, 80 feet of elevation changes, grass-covered boundaries and FoamAir fences outside the corners to soften the impact of going off course. (There have been four accidents on the track but no injuries.) Wilzig, who once made headlines for having co-owned a castle in Water Mill, LI, with his brother Ivan, describes the track as a “field of dreams for motor sports.” The impetus for it came in the late 1990s after a motorcycle-riding buddy in the Hamptons nearly got killed by an automobile; the idea of street-riding became increasingly unappealing to Wilzig. “After 100,000 miles of around-the-world motorcycle-riding without incident,” he said. “I realized it was only a matter of time before somebody pulled out in a fancy car and hit me.” Wilzig financed his property purchase with cash from the sale of the Trust Company of New Jersey bank in 2004. Long controlled by Wilzig’s father, Siggi B., who died in 2003, it went for $726 million. In 2005, Alan took his cut of the profits and bought the 275-acre spread upstate for $3.35 million. “I bought this property with the intention of building a racetrack,” said Wilzig, who served as the bank’s CEO and now focuses primarily on philanthropy.