It’s 100 years since Brooklands staged the first British Grand Prix. As Weybridge prepares to party, Simon Collins is on pole...
On a silent Surrey afternoon, with almost no one else around, I stroll along the Finishing Straight of the old Brooklands motor racing circuit. Grass pushes through the cracks of the decaying concrete surface where British motorsport was born.
But this year, on the second Saturday of August, the green flag will be raised again, as Brooklands Museum marks the centenary of the first ever British Grand Prix.
Brooklands Museum
Held here on August 7, 1926, the race formed part of the World Manufacturers’ Championship that predated the Drivers’ Championship by more than 20 years.
A century on, Brooklands will bring together one of the largest collections of Grand Prix cars ever seen – 100 of them, ancient and modern alike – on a day of colourful celebrations.
Expect live demos on the nearby Mercedes-Benz World circuit, along with ‘dynamic displays’ on the Members’ Banking and Finishing Straight of the original Brooklands track.
There will also be driver interviews, interactive experiences and a ‘1926 themed atmosphere’, evoking the fizz and bubble of the interwar years.
Motor racing was different back then.
Brooklands Museum
At Brooklands, drivers would overtake their slower rivals by rising close to the edge of the 30° bank, thrilling the crowds but occasionally misjudging, launching themselves over the top into oblivion.
The report of that first Grand Prix is an eye-popping read. Only three of the nine cars finished, two of which required two separate drivers to get them over the line.
Robert Benoist, whose Delage came third, was forced to wrap asbestos sheeting around his exhaust to prevent it from burning through the car.
Brooklands Museum
He eventually handed over to the meticulously prepared André Dubonnet, who had never driven the circuit before and pitched up for the race in a lounge suit.
Dramatic days. And yet, in a way, those early races highlight a conundrum that remains at the heart of the sport. Which is more important: man or machine? Is it the driver who determines the outcome, or the constructors and designers and their teams of engineers and mechanics?
Allan Winn, the greatly respected Vice-President of Brooklands Museum, who is my guide for this walk around the site, provides a nuanced response.
Brooklands Museum
“Top drivers need superb skill and intense ambition, but they must also possess an intuitive feel for the intricacies of the machine’s performance and be able to convey their opinions to the technicians,” he says. “Otherwise, the team won’t know what to improve.”
Brooklands was founded in 1907 by the local landowner, Hugh Locke King, whose European travels had impressed upon him the need for Britain to have a motor testing track of its own.
With a blanket speed limit of 20mph, the country had no legal means of developing fast cars.
When Brooklands opened, it effectively became the world’s first speedway, holding pride of place at the centre of British motorsport until racing stopped in 1939.
Wandering round with Allan, it requires little imagination to suppose, playfully, that we can still hear the incredible roar of those early racing cars and see them hurtle past in a perilous blur.
Brooklands Museum
I ask him about the 12-metre-high scoreboard. It has a curiously archaic, handcrafted presence, and appears to be older than the cars in the museum that retain their aura of Futurismo.
As with so much else in motorsport, the answer to the riddle lies in the original association between track and turf. Horse racing rules, traditions and terminologies abound.
Gathering in the paddock, circuits and finishing straights, the clerk of the course, team colours, the handicapping of horsepower by adding weights to the cars to equalise capacity (a practice today replaced by aerodynamic testing restrictions and enforced budget ceilings): all this and more is derived from the Sport of Kings.
Brooklands Museum
We head for the clubhouse, the robust Edwardian architecture of which seems to symbolise the atmosphere of this place.
Brooklands Museum, however, is not confined to a single building, but fills a large part of the space within the 2¾-mile circumference of the surviving track.
Once about the size of Hyde Park, at 330 acres, Brooklands beautifully combines the interwoven histories of motoring, motorcycling, pedal cycling – even penny-farthings raced here – and, of course, aviation.
Brooklands Museum
Brooklands was also one of Britain’s first airfields, the large flat area inside the circuit proving ideal for testing early planes.
Many of the pilots who joined the Royal Flying Corps – air arm of the British Army before and during the First World War – learned their craft here, and by 1918, Brooklands was also the country’s largest aircraft manufacturing centre, driving the growth of Weybridge, Byfleet and surrounds.
Vickers, which launched its flying school at Brooklands in 1912 and began manufacturing there during WWI, built large numbers of houses to accommodate its workforce. Today, many of the museum’s 900 volunteers have generational links with Brooklands.
“Everything here,” remarks Allan, reflecting the theme of continuity, “was either wholly or partly made on this site.”
Which amounts to over 50,000 items – including the beautiful Concorde before us now. It was Allan, during his time as the museum’s CEO, who oversaw the acquisition and restoration of the iconic plane.
Today, the ‘Concorde Experience’, a half-hour virtual flight, is one of the museum’s most popular attractions, while planes such as the Vickers VC10 and Vickers Vanguard – a four-engine turboprop airliner from 1961 – are also part of the collection.
“You can trace a direct line from early postwar aircraft to Concorde, all designed and built here,” says Allan. “The evolution took just over 20 years. It was an extraordinary period of technological progress.”
Brooklands Museum
We move across to the cavernous Bellman hangar – a form of temporary hangar capable of easy transportation – inside which the museum has recreated an aircraft factory, enabling visitors to engage interactively with the engineering process.
In total, more than 18,000 aircraft – including 2,515 Wellingtons and 3,012 Hawker Hurricanes, stars of the Battle of Britain – were built here down the years, often in the teeth of Luftwaffe raids during World War II.
None of which was more destructive than the raid of September 4, 1940, which killed nearly 90 Vickers employees and injured around 420. The air raid shelters on site are still there, a haunting reminder of those dark days.
But today all is calm, as Allan and I arrive back at the Finishing Straight. The air of melancholy grandeur, so prevalent earlier on, seems somehow to have dissipated; the lost industrial amphitheatre resonant with the vitality of its former days.
Brooklands Museum
The British Grand Prix returned to Brooklands just once after 1926 – the following year, when Robert Benoist prevailed in a Delage.
After that, the concept went into abeyance until after the war, by which time racing at Brooklands had ceased and the track’s decline and fall had begun.
The show moved on, but the memories linger still. And on August 8, the echoes of that glorious past will be heard loud and clear, as Britain’s premier motor race performs its centenary lap.
Grand Prix Celebration Event takes place on Saturday August 8; brooklandsmuseum.com. Adults £39.95, children aged 4 to 17 £19.95 (under 4s free).
