Aintree Motor Racing Circuit: The Grand Prix Years

In July 1955 a crowd stood in the grandstands built for the Grand National and watched four silver Mercedes-Benz cars come home in a line, Stirling Moss at the front of them. That was the first British Grand Prix at the Aintree motor racing circuit, a three-mile track laid out inside the Liverpool racecourse and opened in 1954, and it remains the moment the place is remembered for.

The short answer to what Aintree was: a Grand Prix circuit built by the racecourse owner, running around the inside of the Grand National course and over the Melling Road, which staged five British Grands Prix as rounds of the Formula 1 world championship, in 1955, 1957, 1959, 1961 and 1962. The full circuit closed after 1964. A shorter club loop survives inside the racecourse and is still used, mainly for motorcycle race meetings, sprints and track days. No other venue has held both a world championship Grand Prix and the Grand National.

The rest of this guide covers how a horse racing family came to build it, the corners and where they ran, the five Grands Prix in turn, the non-championship races, why it all stopped, and what a visitor to Aintree in England can still find of it. The wider story of the race it hosted sits in our history of the British Grand Prix, and there is more on circuits and series across Britain on the motorsport section.

• 1954Year the circuit opened
• 3Grand Prix lap in miles
• 5British Grands Prix staged
• 1964Last full-circuit season

Fixed historical figures. The lap length is for the full Grand Prix circuit, not the club loop still in use.

Mirabel Topham's circuit beside the Grand National course

Aintree was a racecourse with one very large day a year and a great deal of empty infrastructure the rest of the time. That was the problem Mirabel Topham was trying to solve. The Topham family had run the racecourse for generations, and by the early 1950s Mrs Topham, who had married into the family, was running it, the family having bought the freehold from the Earl of Sefton after the war. She had grandstands, car parks, catering and a paddock built for one spring meeting, a site on the edge of a city with a huge sporting population, and no other way of filling them.

Motor racing offered one. Goodwood in Sussex had shown in 1948 that an existing estate with an existing perimeter could be turned into a circuit, and Aintree was described at its opening as a northern Goodwood. Silverstone, the post-war home of the British Grand Prix, was a bleak airfield in Northamptonshire with temporary stands. Aintree could offer something Silverstone could not: permanent grandstands with a view, already built and already paid for.

Sharing the buildings with the horses

The circuit was built as a new tarmac road on the infield, running inside the racing turf for most of its length. That arrangement mattered. The Grand National course itself was never surfaced, so the fences, the ditches and the turf that horses jump in April were left alone, and the motor circuit simply followed a line close to them. The main grandstands served both sports. The start and finish straight of the motor circuit ran in front of them, so a spectator in a seat built to watch the finish of the National could watch the start of a Grand Prix from the same place.

The paddock arrangements followed the same principle. Racecourse buildings did the work of garages and team areas, and the general enclosures that held National crowds held motor racing crowds. For a promoter this was the whole point. Every pound of income from a motor race was earned on buildings that had already been paid for by the horse racing.

The weakness was also built in. A circuit on a racecourse belonged, in the end, to a racecourse owner, and decisions about it were decisions about the racecourse. When the family's priorities changed in the 1960s, the circuit went with them.

What Topham built was a serious track, not a novelty. Three miles to a lap, flat, fast in places and slow in others, with long straights where cars of the period could stretch their legs. It took the British Grand Prix within a year of opening.

A lap of the Aintree Grand Prix circuit, corner by corner

The Grand Prix circuit was three miles long and, unlike most British circuits of the time, was laid out from scratch rather than borrowed from a runway. Its corner names came almost entirely from the racecourse around it, which makes reading an Aintree lap chart a strange experience for anyone who knows the National: Bechers, Melling Crossing and Tatts belong to horse racing first.

Starting in front of the grandstands, the lap took cars away from the stands to Waterway, then on to Anchor Crossing, where the circuit crossed the line of the racecourse near the canal end of the site. Cottage, Country and Village came next, a sequence of bends that took the circuit through the far side of the property.

Bechers followed. The motor racing corner shared its name and its general position with the most famous fence in jump racing, and the Grand National course was close by. Our guide to Becher's Brook and its drop explains the fence itself; for the cars it was simply a bend that fed the longest flat-out stretch of the lap.

The Railway Straight, Melling Crossing and Tatts

After Bechers came the Railway Straight, running beside the railway line that bounds that side of the racecourse. It was the place where the most powerful cars gained their time. At its end the circuit crossed the Melling Road, the public road that cuts across the racecourse and is closed when racing is on, at Melling Crossing. Tatts was the last corner, named after the Tattersalls enclosure, and brought the cars back on to the straight in front of the stands.

Corner or section	Where it sat on the lap
Waterway	First corner after the start
Anchor Crossing	Out towards the canal end of the site
Cottage, Country and Village	The run around the far side
Bechers	Leading on to the long straight; named after the Grand National fence
Railway Straight	The flat-out stretch beside the railway line
Melling Crossing	Where the circuit crossed the Melling Road
Tatts	Final corner before the stands, named after the Tattersalls enclosure

The circuit was flat. There was none of the elevation that makes Brands Hatch or Oulton Park difficult, which put the emphasis on braking points and on getting the power down out of the slower corners. Drivers of the period found it less intimidating than the old road courses of Europe and less bleak than Silverstone. A visual landmark was hard to come by in the infield, and the flatness meant spectators away from the stands saw only short sections.

1. 1Start and finishCars left the line in front of the racecourse grandstands.
2. 2Waterway and Anchor CrossingThe opening bends took the circuit out towards the canal end of the site.
3. 3Cottage, Country and VillageA run of bends around the far side of the racecourse near Aintree village.
4. 4BechersThe bend named after the Grand National fence fed the fastest part of the lap.
5. 5Railway StraightThe long flat-out stretch beside the railway line.
6. 6Melling Crossing and TattsThe circuit crossed the Melling Road and turned back on to the straight.

The order of named corners and straights on the three-mile circuit used from 1954 to 1964. No speeds are given because none were officially recorded corner by corner.

1955: Mercedes first to fourth and Moss's first win

Sixteen July 1955. Mercedes-Benz arrived at Aintree as the dominant team in Grand Prix racing, with the W196 and two drivers, Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, who had finished first and second at the two previous rounds, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Karl Kling and Piero Taruffi drove the other two cars.

The race became a procession of silver. Moss took pole and led for most of the distance, with Fangio tucked in behind him, and the four Mercedes finished first, second, third and fourth: Moss, Fangio, Kling, Taruffi. Moss's winning margin over Fangio was a fraction of a second, small enough to be measured in tenths.

It was Moss's first win in a world championship Grand Prix. It also made him the first British driver to win the British Grand Prix since it became part of the championship in 1950, which is why the result ran as a national story rather than a sporting one.

Did Fangio let Moss win at Aintree?

Nobody has ever proved it either way. Fangio sat behind his team-mate for lap after lap in a car that was at least as fast, and crossed the line within a few lengths of him. Moss asked him afterwards whether he had held back. Fangio's answer, which he repeated for the rest of his life, was that Moss had simply been better on the day. Moss, for his part, said he was never entirely sure.

There are two honest readings. One is that Fangio, already well on the way to the championship, saw no reason to race his team-mate at his home Grand Prix and gave a young Englishman the moment. The other is that Moss was quicker at Aintree that weekend, as he was at a number of tracks during his career, and Fangio was happy to follow him rather than take a risk for a win he did not need. Both are consistent with the timing. The neatness of the finish makes the first one tempting. It does not make it true.

What is not in doubt is the scale of what Mercedes showed that day. The W196 was a car of fuel injection and a desmodromic valve engine at a time when most of its rivals were developments of pre-war ideas, and at a flat, fast circuit it was unmatched. By the end of that season the company had withdrawn from motor racing, in the aftermath of the Le Mans disaster in June, and the W196 never raced in Britain again.

For Aintree the result was a perfect start. The new circuit had held the race and produced a British winner in front of grandstands built for the Grand National. It earned the venue its place on the calendar for the next seven years, sharing the race with Silverstone in alternate seasons.

1957: Moss takes over Brooks's Vanwall

Two years later Aintree produced the race most British motor racing historians would put first on any list. On 20 July 1957, a British car won a world championship Grand Prix for the first time.

The car was the Vanwall, built by Tony Vandervell's team in Acton, west London, with an engine developed from motorcycle racing principles. Vanwall entered three cars for the race, which also carried the title of European Grand Prix that year. Stirling Moss led one; Tony Brooks drove another, still not fully fit after a crash at Le Mans a few weeks before; Stuart Lewis-Evans drove the third.

Moss led from the start and looked comfortable until his car developed a misfire and he had to pit. The rules of the time allowed a driver to take over a team-mate's car and share the points, and Vanwall had planned for it. Brooks was called in and Moss climbed into his car, rejoining well down the order, in ninth by most accounts.

The chase back to the front

What followed was a drive that is still cited as one of Moss's finest. He worked back through the field lap by lap. The leading cars were the Maserati of Jean Behra and the Ferrari of Mike Hawthorn. Behra's clutch failed late in the race, scattering debris, and Hawthorn's tyre was punctured on the wreckage. Lewis-Evans was briefly in front before Moss passed him, and a throttle problem later cost Lewis-Evans several laps. Moss held the lead to the flag.

The win was credited to Brooks and Moss jointly, as the shared-drive rules required, and the points were split between them. For British motor racing the significance went far beyond the points. A British team with a British car and two British drivers had beaten Ferrari and Maserati in a championship race, in England, at a circuit opened three years before.

Vanwall went on to win more races that season and the next, and in 1958 took the first constructors' championship ever awarded. The road to the dominance of British teams in the 1960s and beyond runs straight through Aintree on that July afternoon.

Year	Winner	Car	Detail worth knowing
1955	Stirling Moss	Mercedes-Benz W196	Mercedes first to fourth; Moss's first championship win
1957	Tony Brooks and Stirling Moss	Vanwall	First world championship win for a British car; also the European Grand Prix
1959	Jack Brabham	Cooper-Climax	Mid-engined car wins on the way to Brabham's first title
1961	Wolfgang von Trips	Ferrari	A wet race and a Ferrari one-two-three
1962	Jim Clark	Lotus 25	Clark wins from pole in the monocoque Lotus

1959, 1961 and 1962: Brabham, von Trips and Clark

The three later British Grands Prix at Aintree each caught a different turn in the sport, and between them they show how quickly Formula 1 was changing at the end of the 1950s.

1959: the Cooper's engine in the back

Jack Brabham won in July 1959 in a Cooper-Climax, a small, light car with its engine behind the driver. Mid-engined cars had won championship races before that season, but 1959 was the year the layout became the standard rather than the oddity, and Brabham's Aintree win was one of the steps on the way to his first world title that autumn. Stirling Moss finished second in a BRM entered by the British Racing Partnership, and Bruce McLaren, Brabham's young Cooper team-mate, was third.

Tyres decided much of it. Brabham managed his across the distance without stopping, while rivals had to pit. On a flat circuit with long straights and few places to rest a tyre, that kind of restraint counted for more than outright pace.

1961: von Trips in the rain

The 1961 race on 15 July was wet. Ferrari had the best car of the year in the 156, with its shark-nose bodywork and a V6 engine well suited to the new 1.5-litre rules, and the British teams were still catching up. Wolfgang von Trips won, with Phil Hill second and Richie Ginther third, a Ferrari one-two-three.

The race also included a curiosity. The Ferguson P99, a four-wheel-drive car built by Harry Ferguson's research company, made what turned out to be its only world championship appearance at Aintree that day. Jack Fairman started it, Moss took it over after his own car retired, and the car was then disqualified because it had received outside assistance earlier in the race. Moss won a non-championship race in the same car at Oulton Park that September, which our guide to the Oulton Park circuit and its Gold Cup covers.

Von Trips was killed at Monza that September, in an accident that also took the lives of spectators. The Aintree race was his last championship victory.

1962: Clark and the Lotus 25

The final British Grand Prix at Aintree belonged to Jim Clark and the Lotus 25, Colin Chapman's monocoque car, which built its strength into a stressed tub rather than a framework of tubes. Clark started from pole, led throughout and won by a comfortable distance, with John Surtees second in a Lola and Bruce McLaren third. It was the beginning of the most dominant run of the Clark and Lotus partnership; he won the race at Silverstone, Brands Hatch and Silverstone again in the years that followed.

None of the five Aintree winners was a fluke result, and that is the best measure of the circuit. It rewarded the best car and the best driver, which is more than can be said for some of the circuits that replaced it.

Aintree5races

Silverstone3races

World championship British Grands Prix only, counted by host circuit across the eight seasons in which Aintree was on the calendar.

Show the numbers

British Grand Prix venues, 1955 to 1962

Item	Value
Aintree	5races
Silverstone	3races

The Aintree 200 and Formula 1 cars in the Liverpool spring

The British Grand Prix was one race a year at most. The circuit needed others, and the most important of them was the Aintree 200, a non-championship race held at Aintree in most springs between 1954 and 1964, though not in every year: there was no running at Aintree in 1955 or 1957.

Non-championship Formula 1 races were a normal part of the British season then. Goodwood had its Easter meeting, Silverstone had the International Trophy, Snetterton, Oulton Park and Brands Hatch had their own, and teams used them to test cars, give drivers race mileage and collect starting money. The Aintree 200 slotted into that early-season calendar. The name referred to the race distance.

Stirling Moss won the first, a Formula Libre race in May 1954, before the circuit had even hosted a Grand Prix. He won it again in 1956, 1958 and 1960. Jack Brabham won the last, in April 1964. In between the race attracted the leading British teams and many of the leading drivers, and the formula it ran to changed over the years as the regulations did, so not every running was for full Formula 1 cars.

The lap record that still stands

The fastest lap ever recorded on the full Aintree circuit came at one of these spring races rather than a Grand Prix. Jim Clark lapped in 1 minute 51.8 seconds in a Lotus 25 at the 1963 Aintree 200. Because the full circuit closed the following year, that figure has never been beaten and never can be.

Club racing filled the rest of the calendar. Saloon cars, sports cars, Formula Junior and the smaller national categories ran at Aintree meetings through the 1950s and early 1960s, and motorcycle meetings used the circuit too. For club competitors in the North West it was the nearest circuit with a proper paddock and real grandstands, and that mattered more to them than its place in Grand Prix history.

Race type at Aintree	When it ran	What it offered
British Grand Prix	1955, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1962	World championship points and the biggest crowds
Aintree 200	Most springs from 1954 to 1964	Non-championship racing, usually for Formula 1 cars
National and club car meetings	Through the life of the full circuit	Saloons, sports cars and junior single-seaters
Motorcycle race meetings	From the 1950s; on the club loop since 1982	Regional and club motorcycle racing

The spring date carried its own problem. The Grand National itself was run in late March or early April, and the racecourse had to be prepared for it. Fitting a major motor race around the horse racing year was never simple, and the National always came first.

Why the Grand Prix left and the full circuit closed

There was no single moment of failure. The Grand Prix left Aintree after 1962, the full circuit kept running for two more seasons, and by the end of 1964 it had stopped, for reasons that were partly about motor racing and partly about the racecourse.

On the motor racing side, Brands Hatch was the new competitor. The Kent circuit had been extended into a full Grand Prix circuit in 1960, sat within reach of London, and had natural banks that made spectating easier than on a flat infield. From 1964 the British Grand Prix alternated between Brands Hatch and its Grand Prix loop and Silverstone, and that arrangement lasted until 1986. Aintree had been the second venue in the original alternation; Brands Hatch took its place.

Cost was the second issue. Running a Grand Prix meant paying teams starting money, building temporary facilities and covering a large staff for a single weekend. A flat circuit with grandstands in only one place was harder to sell to spectators than the natural amphitheatres elsewhere, and the economics that had looked attractive in 1954 looked thinner by 1962.

A racecourse with troubles of its own

The decisive factor was the racecourse. By the early 1960s Mirabel Topham was looking for ways to realise the value of the land, and in the mid-1960s she announced plans to sell Aintree for development. The sale, and the legal argument over whether covenants on the land prevented it, ran on for years. The Grand National itself spent much of the 1970s under threat of being run for the last time, and the course was secured for racing only in 1983, after a public appeal led by the Jockey Club.

A motor circuit was not a priority in that situation. Investment in the full three-mile track stopped, the Grand Prix contracts were not renewed, and the long circuit was abandoned after 1964. It was an asset of the racecourse, and the racecourse was fighting for its own life.

The judgement worth making is that Aintree lost the Grand Prix less because it was a poor circuit than because its owner's interests lay elsewhere. Silverstone was run by motor racing people for motor racing. Aintree was run by a racecourse company for whom motor racing had been a sideline from the start.

The Club circuit that kept car racing going into the 1980s

When the long circuit was abandoned, a shorter loop inside the racecourse stayed in use. It reused part of the original Grand Prix track, including the stretch in front of the stands, and cut across the infield to make a lap of roughly a mile and a half.

The club loop is usually quoted at 1.535 miles, or 2.47 kilometres, which is about half the Grand Prix layout. It existed from the circuit's first season as a shorter alternative, so it was a ready-made circuit when the long track was given up. Figures for the loop vary a little between sources, which reflects alterations made to it over the years.

What raced on the shorter loop

Club car racing carried on through the 1960s and 1970s. The national championships largely went elsewhere, to Oulton Park in Cheshire and to the bigger southern circuits, and Aintree became a local venue for the North West clubs: saloons, sports cars, single-seaters of the junior formulae, and the kind of meetings where entrants drove to the circuit in the car they raced.

Car race meetings dwindled over the years that followed. The racecourse was still under threat, the site had little money spent on it, and the noise and the restrictions of sharing a working racecourse made regular car racing harder to justify. The Aintree Motor Cycle Racing Club took on the circuit for motorcycle racing in 1982, and from then on the club loop has been chiefly a motorcycle venue.

Feature	Grand Prix circuit	Club circuit
Length of lap	3 miles	About 1.5 miles
Years in use	1954 to 1964	From 1954 to the present
Main users	Formula 1, national and club car racing	Club car racing, then motorcycles, sprints and track days
Status today	Closed after 1964	In use on dates that fit the racing calendar

The shorter loop was never meant to be a circuit in its own right. It was what remained when the expensive part was given up. That it has lasted far longer than the Grand Prix circuit is one of the quieter ironies of the site.

Aintree motor racing today: sprints, track days and motorcycles

The question most searchers bring is whether the Aintree motor circuit is still used. It is, on a limited calendar.

Motorcycle racing is the main activity. The Aintree Motor Cycle Racing Club has run meetings on the club circuit since 1982, several a year, with races across the club and national classes from small-capacity machines up to superbikes, sidecars and classic bikes. These are club meetings, run under the regulations of the governing body for two-wheeled racing, with entrants who range from newcomers to riders with national championship experience. They are not the British Superbike Championship, which has never used Aintree; our explanation of how British Superbikes works covers that series and its circuits.

Car activity is lighter. Sprints, in which cars run against the clock one at a time rather than racing wheel to wheel, use the circuit on some dates, run by motor clubs under Motorsport UK permits. Track days, where drivers pay to drive their own cars on the circuit without timing or racing, run on others. Neither involves a race in the usual sense, but both keep cars on the tarmac.

Fitting around the horses

Everything depends on the racing calendar. Aintree is a working racecourse with fixtures through the jumps season and the Grand National Festival in April. The motor circuit runs inside it, so no motor event can disturb the turf, the fences or the preparation for a race meeting. Dates for motorcycle and car events are set around the horse racing year, not the other way round.

There is also a practical limit on what can be built. The circuit cannot have permanent run-off and barriers on the scale of a modern dedicated venue without affecting the racecourse, so its safety arrangements and the kinds of event it can hold are shaped by what the racecourse can accommodate.

Current event dates, entry fees and admission prices change each year and are set by the organising clubs. This guide does not list them; the organisers publish them before each season.

Standing on the old Grand Prix circuit beside the National fences

A visitor who walks the racecourse on a quiet day can still find the old track, provided they know where it went.

The start and finish straight is the easy part. It ran in front of the main stands, which have been rebuilt and extended since the 1950s, and the line of the straight is still there as part of the racecourse infrastructure. Standing on the steps where crowds watched Moss and Fangio, the view across the course is recognisably the one in the photographs, even if the buildings around it are not.

The far side of the circuit is harder. The Grand Prix track ran inside the Grand National course, and the National fences and their surrounds have been altered repeatedly for safety since the 1960s, most visibly at Becher's Brook. Parts of the old route lie within the racecourse's own roads and tracks, and the line of the Railway Straight can be traced beside the railway that still bounds the course. Our Aintree Racecourse guide covers the racecourse layout itself and how to reach it.

The Melling Road

The Melling Road is the most tangible link. It is still a public road across the racecourse, still closed and covered when horses race over it, and still the line where the Grand Prix circuit crossed. Anyone who has watched the National on television has seen the field cross it. The cars crossed it at Melling Crossing, every lap of every race on the long circuit.

Access is limited. Much of the old circuit is on land that is part of a working racecourse and is not open to the public outside events. On race days, the crowd is there for the horses, and the routes of the old circuit are inside areas used for racing operations. The best chance to see the old Grand Prix line is from the stands, with a map of the old layout and some patience.

Aintree does not present itself as a motor racing venue with a Grand Prix past; it presents itself as the home of the Grand National, and the motor circuit is a footnote in its own history.

Aintree's place in British motor racing history

The circuit lasted ten seasons in its full form. In that time it staged five world championship Grands Prix, saw the first championship win for a British driver at his home race and the first for a British car anywhere, and hosted the last world championship win of Wolfgang von Trips and the first British Grand Prix win of Jim Clark.

It is the only venue anywhere to have staged both a world championship Grand Prix and the Grand National. That fact gets repeated as trivia. It is more interesting than that, because it explains everything about the circuit: what made it possible, which was the racecourse infrastructure, and what ended it, which was the racecourse's priorities.

What the alternation began

Aintree's other legacy is structural. The British Grand Prix had been run at Silverstone from 1948 until 1954. From 1955 it moved between Aintree and Silverstone, and when Aintree dropped out, Brands Hatch took its place in the rotation. The principle that the race could move between English circuits, and that more than one venue could compete for it, lasted until 1987, when Silverstone became the permanent host.

In that sense Aintree established a pattern that shaped British motor racing for thirty years. The competition between circuits for the Grand Prix pushed investment in facilities, and the rivalry between Silverstone and Brands Hatch through the 1970s and 1980s was a direct descendant of the rivalry between Silverstone and Aintree in the 1950s. Our Silverstone circuit guide picks up the story from the point where the alternation ended.

Era	British Grand Prix host arrangement	Venues involved
1948 to 1954	One fixed venue	Silverstone
1955 to 1962	Alternation, with Aintree taking five races	Aintree and Silverstone
1963 to 1986	Alternation after Aintree dropped out	Silverstone and Brands Hatch
1987 onwards	One fixed venue	Silverstone

Cumulative count of world championship British Grands Prix staged at Aintree, by year. The total stopped at five after 1962.

Show the numbers

British Grands Prix held at Aintree, running total

Item	Races held
1955	1races
1957	2races
1959	3races
1961	4races
1962	5races
1964	5races

The judgement on Aintree is a generous one. It was a good circuit, well run on its big days, that produced worthy winners every time it held the Grand Prix. It deserved a longer life than its owner's circumstances allowed. And because the full track closed so early, it is preserved in its 1950s state in a way that no living circuit can be: Moss, Brooks, Brabham, von Trips and Clark are the only drivers who ever won a Grand Prix there, and Clark's lap of 1 minute 51.8 seconds will always be the fastest. For a broader picture of the sport in England beyond motor racing, the England sport hub gathers the rest of our guides.