A hundred years since the Grand Prix came to Brooklands

Table of Contents

• Nine started and three finished
• A speedbowl pretending to be a road course
• The cars that cooked their own drivers
• What Brooklands is putting on
• The sold out problem and the one way in
• A centenary that has been running all year
• If you cannot get through the gate

A hundred years ago next month, Britain finally got a Grand Prix of its own. It took until 1926, rather later than the national self image would like, and when it arrived it was held on a concrete speedbowl in Surrey built for record breaking rather than racing. Nine cars started. Three finished. The winner was French, the runner up was a man who had already taken the land speed record twice, and the whole thing lasted just over four hours in cockpit heat severe enough that one driver kept stopping to dip his feet in water.

That race was the Grand Prix of the Royal Automobile Club, run at Brooklands on Saturday 7 August 1926. On Saturday 8 August this year, Brooklands Museum marks the hundredth anniversary with roughly a hundred Grand Prix cars gathered on the ground where it happened. If you have not already got a ticket, I have bad news and one piece of good news.

Nine started and three finished

The bare result reads oddly to modern eyes. Robert Sénéchal and Louis Wagner shared a Delage 15 S 8 and won in four hours and fifty six seconds, over 110 laps of a 2.61 mile course, which comes out at 287 miles of racing. Malcolm Campbell brought his Bugatti 39A home second, nearly ten minutes down. Robert Benoist and André Dubonnet took third in the other Delage, another two and a half minutes back. That was the entire finishing order, because the other six retired.

Two things stand out. Both podium Delages were shared drives, normal practice at the time and a fair indication of how brutal the race was. And Campbell had already held the land speed record twice by then, both times on Pendine Sands, so the man who finished second in Britain's first Grand Prix was probably the most famous driver in the country before he turned a wheel at it. He was also the only Briton on the podium, in a French car, which set a tone the following decades took a long time to shake off.

The fastest lap went to Henry Segrave in a Talbot at one minute forty nine and a half seconds. Segrave, like Campbell, spent most of his career chasing outright speed rather than Grand Prix wins, which tells you what Brooklands was really for.

A speedbowl pretending to be a road course

The venue is the part I find genuinely charming. Brooklands was a banked oval, opened in 1907 and designed so cars could run flat out more or less indefinitely. A Grand Prix, by the standards of the day, was supposed to be held on something resembling a road, with corners that required actual braking and gear changing.

So the organisers improvised. Rather than send the cars round the full outer circuit, they had them run straight on at the Fork and up the Finishing Straight, then built two chicanes out of sand banks at either end to force the drivers to slow down and turn. A temporary road course, assembled from piled sand, inside a purpose built speedbowl. It should not have worked and by most accounts it was not a classic, but it was a Grand Prix, in Britain, and it counted.

That improvisation is why the 1926 race matters more as a beginning than as a spectacle. Alex Patterson, chief executive of Brooklands Museum, has called it a defining moment not just for Brooklands but for the development of international motor racing in the UK. He is right. Everything from Silverstone onwards traces back to those sand banks.

The cars that cooked their own drivers

The 1926 Delages were fast and almost unusable. Their exhaust routing ran the heat straight past the drivers' feet, and over four hours in August that turned the cockpit into an oven. Wagner had to stop repeatedly to cool his feet in water. Benoist pulled in on lap 81 with his exhaust glowing white hot and had asbestos sheeting wrapped round it so he could carry on.

Best of all is André Dubonnet, of the aperitif family, drafted in partway through to relieve Benoist. He climbed into a front running Grand Prix car wearing what was described at the time as an ordinary blue lounge suit, having never driven the circuit in his life, and helped bring it home third. If you have ever wondered why the interwar period gets romanticised, it is not the lap times. It is a man in office clothes taking over a car that was busy setting fire to itself.

Delage, to their credit, redesigned the exhaust over the winter, and the 15 S 8 went on to become one of the dominant Grand Prix cars of the late twenties. The 1926 race at Brooklands was, in effect, its miserable and victorious debut.

What Brooklands is putting on

The Grand Prix Centenary event ran from 10am to 5pm on Saturday 8 August at the museum on Brooklands Road, Weybridge. The headline is around a hundred Grand Prix cars spanning the full century, from the machinery of the twenties through to modern Formula One.

They are not all static, either. The early cars are due to run on the Members' Banking and the Finishing Straight, which is the surface the 1926 race actually used, while the later and faster machinery uses the Mercedes-Benz World test track next door. There is also a new redisplay in the Jackson Shed built around the story of the first British Grand Prix, using original objects from the museum's collection.

The Royal Automobile Club is closely involved, which is fitting given the club organised the 1926 race in the first place, and the historic RAC Trophy is part of the display. Adult advance admission was priced at £39.95, with accompanied children aged four to seventeen at £19.95 and under fours free.

The sold out problem and the one way in

Now the bad news. Saturday 8 August is sold out. Not nearly sold out: gone, with the museum confirming that no tickets will be available on the day. If you were planning to turn up and pay at the gate, do not drive to Weybridge.

The good news is that a limited number of tickets were released for a Premiere Evening on Friday 7 August, which is the actual centenary date and arguably the better ticket anyway. It offers a preview of the full gathering before Saturday, the RAC Trophy, and cars coming down the Members' Banking onto the Finishing Straight. Availability was described as limited when the release was announced, so check the museum's site today rather than next week.

I would take the Friday. Smaller crowd, evening light on the banking, and it falls on the hundredth anniversary to the day.

A centenary that has been running all year

Brooklands is the centrepiece but not the whole of it. The Royal Automobile Club marked it at its Woodcote Park concours earlier this month by parking the winning 1926 Delage alongside modern Formula One machinery, which is about as direct a hundred year handshake as you could stage. The Royal Mint has issued what it says is the first official UK coin celebrating motor sport, carrying 1926 and 2026 designs, with prices starting at £15. The BRDC Classic at Silverstone put historic Formula One cars back on track over the last weekend of July. And Goodwood Revival in September carries its own centenary themes.

If you cannot get through the gate

Saturday 8 August is a busy day regardless. HSCC's 60th anniversary meeting at Castle Combe runs across that weekend at the circuit where the club held its first race, with FF1600, GT, saloon and hot hatch grids. It is proper club level historic racing, tickets are considerably easier to come by, and the Wiltshire circuit in August is no hardship.

Brooklands itself is back on 30 August with American Day, a much more relaxed proposition. The rest of the summer is on our events calendar.

A hundred years on, the sand chicanes are long gone and the banking is broken up and weathered. But the Finishing Straight is still there, cars will run on it again in under a fortnight, and the race that started all of it was won by two Frenchmen in a car that was trying to burn their feet off. Britain's motorsport story began in a genuinely ridiculous fashion, and I think that is worth celebrating properly.