The cheapest way to go racing in the UK, and the club that invented it

Table of Contents

• A club for the impecunious
• What it actually costs in 2026
• The formula that is older than Formula One
• Where the ladder starts
• Chapman built his in a lock-up
• The Birkett at seventy five
• Six weekends left this year

Everybody who has stood at a circuit fence has done the sum in their head. Not seriously, but the thought is there: what would it take to be on the other side of it. Most people put the number somewhere north of a house deposit and go back to watching.

They are wrong, and have been for the best part of ninety years, because the cheapest way to go racing in the UK has had the same answer since 1939 and it is a members' club run out of an office at Donington Park.

A club for the impecunious

The 750 Motor Club was founded in 1939 for what its own history calls the impecunious Austin Seven enthusiast. A wonderful phrase, and also the entire business model. The 750 in the name is the Austin Seven's near-750cc engine, in the 1930s the cheapest four wheels a young man with more enthusiasm than money could get hold of.

It began with road rallies and trials, because those cost almost nothing, and drifted into circuit racing after the war. The figure who turned it into an institution was Holland Birkett, a founder member and post-war chairman. He did three things the club still runs on. He created the 750 Formula. He invented a six hour relay race that has run every year since 1951. And he pushed the club into running its own meetings at Silverstone rather than begging for space at somebody else's.

Today it runs over twenty five series and championships across twenty five to thirty racedays a year. It is a non-profit sporting club, which is why every competitor has to be a member, and the current president is Tony Southgate, whose designs won Le Mans and ran in Formula One. Not a heritage exercise, then.

What it actually costs in 2026

These are the club's own published figures for 2026, and they are lower than almost everybody guesses.

Racing membership is £95 for twelve months from the date you join, not per season. Registering for a series costs £100, or £150 for a full championship, and a single meeting can be entered for around £35. Race entry fees run roughly £340 to £450 for a double header weekend, which gets you qualifying and two races.

Before any of that you need a licence. Motorsport UK's Go Racing pack is £115 and includes your first licence fee, the forms and the ARDS theory material. The ARDS course itself is a day at a circuit, £250 to £400 depending on where you sit it, with £290 about typical. If you are between fourteen and fifty nine with no pre-existing conditions you need an eye test rather than a medical. Renewal afterwards is £104.

Then the car. Secondhand Locost and 750 Formula cars start around £5,000, Roadsports cars can be bought or built from about £4,000. Safety kit is the quiet extra: a roll cage from £650, harnesses from £150, an extinguisher system from £190, plus overalls, helmet and a HANS device.

Add it up honestly. A first season in Locost, buying a sorted car at £5,000, comes out somewhere under £8,000, of which roughly £2,200 is the racing itself and the rest is a car you still own in October. The club quotes a competitive 750 Formula season at £3,000 to £4,000 including entries, running costs, travel and accommodation, with the car on top.

The formula that is older than Formula One

The 750 Formula started in 1949 and has run continuously ever since, which makes it the oldest race formula in the world. Formula One's world championship began in 1950. That is not a technicality the club is shy about mentioning, and nor should it be.

The principle has never changed: hold the engine still and let the imagination loose everywhere else. In 1949 that meant an Austin Seven engine and whatever chassis you could weld. Today it is a 1108cc Fiat FIRE engine in near-standard form with a control camshaft, tuning limited to balancing and a skim, one carburettor choke, and free rein on exhaust and chassis. Slicks and wings, control tyres that last a season, no limited slip differential and no traction control.

That produces the most affordable slicks-and-wings racing in Britain, and grids of cars that genuinely differ from one another because somebody sat at a kitchen table and worked out a better suspension geometry. There are not many corners of British motorsport left where being clever is worth more than being rich.

Where the ladder starts

If building your own car sounds like a project too far, the other formulae are deliberately arranged as a ladder.

Locost is the entry point and the sensible first move. Cars are Ford Crossflow 1300s in a seven-style chassis with standard-ratio gearboxes, drum brakes at the back and a 185/60/13 control tyre, Nankang's NS-2R for 2026. Registration is £145 and entries are £340 to £400. It reliably produces the largest and closest grids in the club, mostly because nobody can buy an advantage.

Roadsports takes production sports and saloon cars and sorts them into four classes by power to weight, from 145 up to 300bhp per tonne, with forced induction cars pegged 5bhp per tonne lower. Registration is £100 and entries £380 to £440. If you already own something quick and want to find out what it can do, this is where it goes.

Sport Specials, Formula Vee, Hot Hatch, Club Enduro and Historic 750 Formula fill in the rest. The club also runs its own mobile rolling road, on the sensible basis that sharing one is cheaper than a hundred members each paying a tuner.

Chapman built his in a lock-up

The alumni list is the bit that makes the whole thing slightly absurd. Colin Chapman was a 750 Motor Club man, and the Lotus Mk3 he built for the formula in 1951 won every race it finished that season. Eric Broadley of Lola came out of the same paddock. So did Derek Bennett of Chevron, Adrian Reynard, Frank Costin and Gordon Murray.

A club for people who could not afford to go racing produced the founders of Lotus, Lola and Chevron, and a good share of everyone who designed a British racing car afterwards. The reason is not mystical. If the rules stop you spending your way to the front, the only thing left to do is think, and the club had several hundred people thinking at once every winter.

The Birkett at seventy five

On Saturday 24 October the club closes its season with the race Birkett invented, on the full Silverstone Grand Prix circuit. This is the 75th running of it, the 76th Birkett event overall once you count the twelve hour version held for the fiftieth. It has gone without a break since 1951.

The format is what I like about it. Teams of three to six drivers with three to six cars, only one car on track at any moment, changeovers made in the pit lane. Up to seventy teams enter, something like three hundred cars and drivers on one entry list. There is a scratch result for whoever completes the most laps and a handicap result based on credit laps awarded by car and driver, so a team of slow cars driven cleanly for six hours can beat a team of quick ones. The club calls it the last bastion of British motorsport and on that day it is hard to argue.

If you want to do it rather than watch it, there is a £30 membership that covers the Birkett and the Plum Pudding meeting only. Six hours at Silverstone for the price of a decent lunch, assuming you can find five friends and three cars.

Six weekends left this year

The 2026 season has a tail on it. Croft comes on 19 and 20 September, Thruxton on the 26th, then Castle Combe on 3 October, Mallory Park on the 11th, Donington Park's GP circuit on 17 and 18 October, and Silverstone for the Birkett on the 24th.

The club's own advice to anyone thinking about it is to turn up at a meeting first, walk the paddock, talk to people and get your car looked at by a scrutineer before committing to anything. That is good advice and it is free, which is rather the point of the place. Our events diary has the rest of the autumn.

Nobody is pretending £8,000 is nothing. But the gap between watching and doing is a great deal narrower than the fence makes it look, and the same club has kept it that way for eighty seven years.