Brands Hatch Circuit: Layout, History and Where to Watch

Stand at the pit wall on the Brabham Straight and the first corner is not there. The road curves gently to the right, rises to a crest at about the point where a driver wants to brake, and drops out of sight into a valley. That is Paddock Hill Bend, and it accounts for most of what people mean when they talk about Brands Hatch: a motor racing circuit in Kent, in the south-east of England, built into a natural bowl beside the A20 at West Kingsdown, about twenty miles from central London.

There are two circuits on the site. The Indy circuit is a short lap of 1.21 miles that stays inside the bowl. The Grand Prix circuit adds a loop through woodland and measures 2.43 miles. Brands Hatch staged twelve British Grands Prix between 1964 and 1986 and two European Grands Prix, lost Formula 1 to Silverstone from 1987, and has belonged since 2004 to MotorSport Vision, the group run by the former Grand Prix driver Jonathan Palmer. It races under a Motorsport UK track licence and is busiest now with touring cars, superbikes and GT cars.

Where Brands Hatch is in Kent, and who owns it

The A20 is the old road from London to Folkestone. Before the M20 took the through traffic it carried the lorries to the Channel ports, and it still runs along the northern rim of the circuit, a few yards behind the main grandstands. The entrance is directly off it. Turn in, and the ground falls away in front of you towards the paddock.

West Kingsdown is the village immediately to the south-east, strung along the same road. The postal address is Fawkham, Longfield, which is the parish on the other side, and the planning authority is Sevenoaks District Council. All of it sits on the dip slope of the North Downs, chalk country with dry valleys cut into it, and the circuit occupies one of those valleys. Nobody dug the bowl. The name is older than the racing by centuries and is usually explained as a corruption of an early form meaning a gateway on a wooded slope, though the derivation is the kind that is repeated more often than it is proved.

That geology is the reason the place works for spectators. A flat circuit shows you a car for three seconds. At Brands Hatch the banks on every side of the short lap look down into the same hollow, so one seat takes in several corners, and the cars spend most of the lap either climbing towards you or dropping away.

The owners, in order

Ownership has changed four times since the track was first surfaced, and each change altered what the circuit was for. A company called Brands Hatch Stadium ran it after the war. Grovewood Securities, a property and investment firm, bought it in 1961, put John Webb in charge and spent the next quarter of a century collecting other circuits and promoting hard. In 1986 John Foulston, who had made his money in computer leasing and raced historic cars, bought the group; he was killed testing a car at Silverstone the following year and his daughter Nicola eventually ran the business. She sold it in 1999 to Octagon, the sports division of the American advertising group Interpublic.

Octagon's ownership was short and expensive. In January 2004 the four circuits it held, Brands Hatch with Oulton Park in Cheshire, Snetterton and Cadwell Park, were sold to MotorSport Vision. MSV later took on Donington Park as well, which makes the company the landlord of a large share of English circuit racing, and its promoting arm, MSVR, runs the British Superbike Championship.

Two circuits in one: the Indy loop and the Grand Prix lap

Every lap of Brands Hatch starts on the Indy circuit. The Grand Prix circuit is the same piece of tarmac with a detour added, which is unusual; at most British tracks the short layout is a cut-through of the long one. Here the short one came first, by a decade, and the long one was bolted on.

• 1.21Indy circuit, miles
• 2.43Grand Prix circuit, miles
• 12British Grands Prix
• 2European Grands Prix

Lap lengths are those published by the circuit owner for the present layouts. The race counts are Formula 1 world championship events only.

The two share the start line, Paddock Hill Bend, Druids, Graham Hill Bend and the Cooper Straight. They part company at Surtees. On the Indy lap a driver flicks left there and immediately right through McLaren to reach Clearways. On the Grand Prix lap the left at Surtees keeps going, under a bridge and down a hill into the trees, and the car is gone from the bowl for the better part of a minute before it comes back under another bridge and rejoins halfway round Clearways.

	Indy circuit	Grand Prix circuit
Length	1.21 miles	2.43 miles
Direction	Clockwise	Clockwise
First raced	1954, when Druids was added	1960
Present length since	2003	2003, when Sheene Curve replaced the Dingle Dell chicane
Leaves the shared lap	Does not	At Surtees
Rejoins	Does not	At Clearways
Formula 1 championship races	None	14

Why the short one is called Indy

For its first quarter-century the short lap was simply the Club circuit. In October 1978 the United States Auto Club brought its Indianapolis cars to England for two races, one at Silverstone and one on the short circuit at Brands Hatch, where Rick Mears won. The name stuck to the track afterwards and has outlasted every car that ran that day. American single-seaters returned once, in 2003, when the Champ Car series raced on the same 1.2 miles.

It is a very short lap for a major circuit. A touring car gets round in well under fifty seconds and a superbike faster than that, which means traffic is constant and a race of twenty-odd laps is over before a spectator has finished a cup of tea. It also means nothing is ever far away.

A note on the old lap lengths

Anyone reading period race reports will find the Grand Prix circuit given as 2.65 miles, and from 1976 as roughly 2.61. The figure in use today is 2.43. The route through the woods is recognisably the one laid in 1960, but corners have been reprofiled several times and the published length has changed with them, so a lap time from 1970 and one from this decade are not measuring the same distance.

Paddock Hill Bend and the climb to Druids

Paddock Hill Bend is a right-hander of something over ninety degrees. That description fits a hundred corners. What makes this one different is the ground under it.

The Brabham Straight, despite its name, bends to the right for its whole length and tilts sideways, so that the starting grid sits on a camber and cars have been known to creep on it. Towards the end the road rises. The braking point comes at the top of that rise, with the car going light, and the turn-in follows at once, before the driver can see where the corner goes. Then the track falls steeply, the apex passes somewhere on the way down, and at the bottom the slope reverses so sharply that the suspension is squashed flat just as the driver wants to be back on the power.

So in the space of a few seconds the car is unloaded, turned, dropped and compressed. Get the entry right and the hill does the work of slowing the car and the dip gives it grip on the way out. Get it wrong by braking a fraction late and there is a gravel trap on the outside that is rarely empty for long. On the opening lap of a touring car race, with twenty-odd cars arriving together and half of them unsighted, it is as reliable a source of incident as any corner in the country.

Formula 1 found that out twice in its last decade here. In 1976 the two Ferraris touched at the first corner and the race was stopped. In 1986 a multiple accident on the run down from the start put Jacques Laffite into the barrier hard enough to break both his legs and end his Grand Prix career.

Hailwood Hill

Out of the dip the road climbs again, steeply, towards the trees. This is Hailwood Hill, named for Mike Hailwood, who won world championships on motorcycles and raced Formula 1 cars and was as much at home here as anyone. It is short and it is a braking zone almost from the bottom, because at the top is a hairpin.

Druids

Druids is the slowest corner on either layout: a right-hand hairpin of about a hundred and eighty degrees, wrapped in trees, entered uphill and left downhill. It was added in 1954 and it is where most of the overtaking on the Indy circuit happens, because the approach is a hard stop after a compromised exit from Paddock and there are two usable lines. A car on the inside blocks the apex. A car on the outside gets a wider, faster arc and the inside line for the next corner, which is a left. The move that starts at Druids is very often finished at Graham Hill Bend.

The rest of the Indy lap: Graham Hill Bend to Clark Curve

The descent from Druids is short and steep and ends in a left-hander that was called Bottom Bend for a quarter of a century. Graham Hill was killed in a flying accident in November 1975, and the corner, altered that winter along with several others, reopened under his name in 1976. It is quicker than it looks from the bank. The exit matters more than the entry, because what follows is the only stretch on the short lap where a car can use its engine.

That stretch is the Cooper Straight, formerly the Bottom Straight, running behind the paddock at the foot of the slope and parallel to the start line above it. It commemorates the Cooper Car Company of Surbiton, whose little rear-engined 500cc cars filled the grids at Brands Hatch in the early 1950s and whose later cars won two world championships. Spectators in the paddock can lean on the fence above it and watch the field go by a few feet below.

Then Surtees, a fast left, named for John Surtees, the only man to win world titles on two wheels and on four, who learned his trade on the grass and tarmac here. On the Indy circuit it is followed at once by McLaren, a right-hander that turns the car back towards the main road, and then by Clearways, a long, opening right that runs downhill at first and then climbs. Clark Curve, the last part of that arc, takes the lap back onto the Brabham Straight. The name honours Jim Clark, who won the first Grand Prix held at the circuit.

Clearways is the corner that decides lap time on the short circuit. A driver who is patient through McLaren and early on the throttle carries that speed the whole length of the pit straight and into the braking area for Paddock, which is the second place a pass is likely.

Corner	Layout	Direction	What to know
Paddock Hill Bend	Both	Right	Blind entry over a crest, steep drop, compression at the bottom
Druids	Both	Right	Hairpin at the top of Hailwood Hill, added in 1954
Graham Hill Bend	Both	Left	Known as Bottom Bend until 1976
Surtees	Both	Left	The point at which the two layouts divide
McLaren	Indy only	Right	Links Surtees to Clearways on the short lap
Clearways	Both	Right	Where the Grand Prix loop rejoins
Clark Curve	Both	Right	The final arc onto the Brabham Straight
Hawthorn Bend	Grand Prix only	Right	Fast, at the top of Hawthorn Hill
Westfield	Grand Prix only	Right	Leads downhill into Dingle Dell
Sheene Curve	Grand Prix only	Right	Blind, over the rise out of Dingle Dell
Stirling's	Grand Prix only	Left	The slowest corner on the loop

Into the woods: Pilgrim's Drop, Hawthorn, Westfield, Dingle Dell, Sheene and Stirling's

The Grand Prix loop is a different circuit in character. The bowl is open and loud and overlooked from every side. The loop is narrow, enclosed by trees, fast, and for long stretches watched by nobody but the marshals.

1. 1SurteesThe left-hander is held instead of flicked right. The car passes under a bridge and leaves the bowl.
2. 2Pilgrim's DropA steep downhill straight into the valley floor, taken flat out.
3. 3Hawthorn Hill and Hawthorn BendThe road climbs sharply to a fast right-hander at the top, among the quickest corners on the circuit.
4. 4Derek Minter StraightA short level run along the far edge of the site, parallel to the village.
5. 5WestfieldA quick right that tips the car downhill again.
6. 6Dingle DellA dip between two rises, with the next corner hidden behind the second of them.
7. 7Sheene CurveA blind right-hander over the crest, committed to before the exit is visible.
8. 8Stirling'sA slower left-hander, and the last real corner before the return.
9. 9ClearwaysA straight back under the second bridge feeds the car into the middle of the long final right.

The sequence of the extension added in 1960, in the order a car meets it on a clockwise lap. Corner names are those in present use.

Pilgrim's Drop presumably takes its name from the Pilgrims' Way, the ancient track along the Downs that passes not far to the south. The road plunges, bottoms out and rears up Hawthorn Hill, and at the top is Hawthorn Bend, a right-hander taken in a high gear with very little margin on the outside. It is named for Mike Hawthorn, Britain's first world champion. It is also where Jo Siffert, who had won the British Grand Prix on this circuit three years earlier, was killed in October 1971 during a non-championship Formula 1 race.

The straight that follows carries the name of Derek Minter, the motorcycle racer from Kent who won here so often in the 1950s and 1960s that the press called him the King of Brands. Westfield comes next, then the drop into Dingle Dell and the climb out of it.

For a period there was a chicane at Dingle Dell, put in to slow cars before the crest. It was not loved, and motorcycles disliked it more than cars did. When it was taken out in 2003 the fast right-hander that replaced it was named for Barry Sheene, who had died that March and whose first race had been at Brands Hatch. Sheene Curve is now the corner drivers talk about after Paddock: approached uphill, blind, and quick enough that a mistake ends in the tyres.

Stirling's, for Stirling Moss, is the tightest corner in the woods, a left that sets the car up for the run back. From there it is a straight line under the bridge to Clearways, where the long lap and the short one become the same road again.

Why the Grand Prix loop is used on so few days a year

A first-time visitor who books a ticket for a club meeting and expects to see the whole circuit in use is often disappointed. Most days at Brands Hatch are Indy days. The long lap is rationed, and the ration is not the owner's choice.

The reason is behind the trees. Hawthorn Bend, the Derek Minter Straight and Westfield run along the edge of West Kingsdown, with houses a short distance from the fence. The bowl contains the noise of the short circuit reasonably well, with the A20 on one side to mask what escapes. The loop projects out of the bowl towards people's gardens.

Use of the site is therefore governed by conditions attached through the planning system and enforced by the local council. The detail has been revised over the years, and the numbers are best taken from the circuit and the council, not from a page like this one. The mechanism is what matters. Days are classified by how noisy the activity is, the noisiest category is capped at a fixed number per year, and the Grand Prix loop carries a much smaller allowance of race days than the Indy circuit. Quiet track days with silenced road cars count differently from a field of unsilenced racing cars.

The consequence is a hierarchy. The handful of long-circuit days go to the meetings that draw the biggest crowds and the series whose contracts specify the full lap. Everything else, which is most of the calendar, runs on the Indy circuit. The same pressure applies in different forms at Thruxton and Goodwood, and anyone who thinks it is peculiar to Kent should read the conditions attached to almost any English circuit that has acquired neighbours since it opened.

From grass-track motorcycles to the Grand Prix loop, 1926 to 1960

The usual account begins with bicycles. In 1926 a group of cyclists from Gravesend got the agreement of the farmer at Brands Farm to race across his fields, and the first recorded race there was between cyclists and cross-country runners. Motorcyclists followed within a couple of years, and by the early 1930s several local clubs had combined to run grass-track meetings on an oval of about three-quarters of a mile in the valley floor.

Grass-track racing was a serious business in Kent between the wars and drew large crowds. The war stopped it; the land was used by the military and was bombed. Racing resumed afterwards, on cinders and grass, and the ambition grew.

In 1950 the oval was surfaced. A mile of tarmac, kidney-shaped, raced anti-clockwise, and opened on 16 April 1950 with a meeting for 500cc cars organised by the Half-Litre Car Club. That class, which became the first Formula 3, was the nursery of post-war British racing drivers, and Brands Hatch was its home ground. Stirling Moss raced there in its first season.

1950 tarmac oval1miles

1954 with Druids1.24miles

1960 Grand Prix circuit2.65miles

Grand Prix circuit today2.43miles

Approximate lap lengths at each stage. The 1960 figure is the one used in period for the Grand Prix circuit; the present-day figure reflects later alterations and is the owner's published length.

Show the numbers

How the Brands Hatch lap grew

Item	Value
1950 tarmac oval	1miles
1954 with Druids	1.24miles
1960 Grand Prix circuit	2.65miles
Grand Prix circuit today	2.43miles

Four years later came the change that made the circuit recognisable. A loop was built up the hill to a new hairpin at Druids, taking the lap to about a mile and a quarter, and the direction of racing was reversed to clockwise. That reversal is why Paddock Hill Bend is what it is. The corner had been the gentle uphill exit of the old lap. Run the other way, it became a blind downhill entry.

The extension into the woods followed in 1960, giving a lap of 2.65 miles and, for the first time, a track long enough for international races. Formula 1 cars came that August for a non-championship event, the Silver City Trophy. Grovewood bought the circuit the next year. A world championship Grand Prix was three years away.

Brands Hatch British Grand Prix history: fourteen championship races

The first was on 11 July 1964. The Royal Automobile Club, which owned the title, chose to organise the race itself and to take it to Kent, ending the arrangement under which Silverstone had shared the Grand Prix with the Aintree circuit on Merseyside. Jim Clark won from Graham Hill. From then until 1986 the British Grand Prix alternated: Brands Hatch in even years, Silverstone in odd.

Year	Race	Winner	Car
1964	British Grand Prix	Jim Clark	Lotus-Climax
1966	British Grand Prix	Jack Brabham	Brabham-Repco
1968	British Grand Prix	Jo Siffert	Lotus-Ford
1970	British Grand Prix	Jochen Rindt	Lotus-Ford
1972	British Grand Prix	Emerson Fittipaldi	Lotus-Ford
1974	British Grand Prix	Jody Scheckter	Tyrrell-Ford
1976	British Grand Prix	Niki Lauda	Ferrari
1978	British Grand Prix	Carlos Reutemann	Ferrari
1980	British Grand Prix	Alan Jones	Williams-Ford
1982	British Grand Prix	Niki Lauda	McLaren-Ford
1983	European Grand Prix	Nelson Piquet	Brabham-BMW
1984	British Grand Prix	Niki Lauda	McLaren-TAG
1985	European Grand Prix	Nigel Mansell	Williams-Honda
1986	British Grand Prix	Nigel Mansell	Williams-Honda

Five of the first six were won by a Lotus or a Brabham, British-built cars both, and a Lotus won four of them. The exception that proves how different the period was is 1968. Jo Siffert's Lotus 49 was not a works car. It belonged to Rob Walker, a private entrant with a garage in Dorking, and the result is generally reckoned the last world championship win for a true privateer of that kind.

Two races are remembered for how they ended. In 1970 Jack Brabham led onto the final lap with the race won and ran out of fuel within sight of the flag, coasting over the line second behind Jochen Rindt. In 1976 James Hunt won on the road after being caught in the first-corner collision and taking the restart in a repaired car; two months later a tribunal disqualified him and gave the race to Niki Lauda, which is why Lauda's name appears three times in the table. The full account of both sits in our history of the British Grand Prix.

The two European Grands Prix

The extra races of 1983 and 1985 were additions to the calendar, run in the autumn under the European Grand Prix title in years when the British Grand Prix proper was at Silverstone. Nelson Piquet won the first on his way to that year's championship.

The second, on 6 October 1985, is the one Kent remembers. Nigel Mansell had started more than seventy Grands Prix without winning any of them. He won this one, in front of a home crowd, and Alain Prost finished far enough up to secure his first world title on the same afternoon. Mansell won again a fortnight later and never looked like a journeyman afterwards. Our page on Mansell's career from Lotus to the 1992 title picks the story up from there. Nine months after that first win he took the 1986 British Grand Prix on the same track, in the team's spare car, after the first start had been stopped.

The Race of Champions

Formula 1 cars also came to Brands Hatch most years for a race that carried no points. The Race of Champions, first run in 1965, was held early in the season and gave teams a competitive outing before the championship began in earnest. It lasted until 1983, when Keke Rosberg won the final edition. No non-championship Formula 1 race has been held anywhere since.

Why Formula 1 left after 1986

The short answer is that the sport's governing body stopped wanting two British venues. During the 1980s it moved towards long-term agreements with a single circuit in each country, and in May 1986 Silverstone and its owner, the British Racing Drivers' Club, signed one with FISA for the British Grand Prix from 1987. The alternation that had run for twenty-three seasons ended without a formal farewell.

The longer answer is topographical. Everything that makes Brands Hatch good to watch made it difficult to modernise. The paddock is a strip of sloping ground between the Brabham Straight and the Cooper Straight below it, and it cannot be made wider without moving one of them. Paddock Hill Bend has a bank behind its gravel trap. Hawthorn Bend and Westfield are lined with trees and backed by a village. Grand Prix cars of the turbo era were arriving at those corners at speeds nobody had imagined in 1960, and the run-off they needed was measured in acres the site did not have.

1. 11961Grovewood Securities buys the circuit a year after the long lap opens, and John Webb runs it.
2. 21964 to 1986The British Grand Prix is held at Brands Hatch in even-numbered years.
3. 31986John Foulston buys the Brands Hatch group in the year of the last Grand Prix. He is killed in a testing accident in 1987.
4. 41999His daughter Nicola sells the company to Octagon, part of Interpublic, which has secured the rights to the British Grand Prix from 2002.
5. 52004Octagon withdraws from motor racing and MotorSport Vision buys the circuits.

The changes of ownership referred to on this page, in order. Dates are the years the circuit changed hands.

Silverstone, by contrast, was a flat airfield with space in every direction. The comparison between them is drawn out in our guide to Silverstone.

There was one serious attempt to bring the race back. At the end of the 1990s the Brands Hatch company obtained the rights to the British Grand Prix from 2002, on the basis that the Kent circuit would be rebuilt to the required standard. The rebuilding would have meant reshaping corners and clearing woodland. It did not happen. The new owner, Octagon, ended up leasing Silverstone and running the Grand Prix there, an arrangement that lost a great deal of money and was unwound within a few years. When Octagon left motor racing altogether, the circuits were sold.

It is hard to see what else could have been done. A Brands Hatch with enough run-off for a modern Grand Prix car would not be Brands Hatch.

The meetings Brands Hatch hosts now

What the circuit lost in status it has largely made up in volume. It runs something close to a full calendar from spring to late autumn, on two layouts, and the major national championships all come.

The British Touring Car Championship is the biggest draw on four wheels. For many seasons it has used both layouts in the same year, the Indy circuit early on and the Grand Prix circuit for the final rounds, so that titles have often been settled in the Kent woods in October. The format of those race days, with their three races and reversed grids, is set out in our guide to the BTCC rules.

British Superbikes draws crowds of a similar size. The championship is run by the circuit owner's own promoting company, and Brands Hatch has repeatedly been given its closing round on the long lap. The points system that makes that final weekend count for so much is explained on our page about how BSB and its Showdown work. World Superbikes raced here too, from the 1990s until 2008, and the meetings of Carl Fogarty's championship years filled the banks as nothing had since the Grand Prix.

British GT brings endurance racing to the Grand Prix circuit. The German DTM touring car series visited for a number of seasons, first on the Indy lap and later on the full one. There are historic meetings, a truck racing weekend late in the year, and a steady programme of club racing in between.

The Formula Ford Festival

One event belongs to Brands Hatch in the way the Grand Prix once did. Formula Ford, the cheap single-seater category that taught two generations of British drivers, held its first race here in July 1967. Its end-of-season Festival moved to the circuit in 1976 and has stayed. The format is a knockout: heats, semi-finals and a final, all on the Indy circuit, all in one autumn weekend, usually on a cold damp track. Johnny Herbert won it in 1985, Eddie Irvine in 1987, Mark Webber in 1996 and Jenson Button in 1998.

Things that were not motor races

The circuit has had one Olympic-scale occasion. In 2012 the road cycling events of the London Paralympic Games were held on and around it, and Alex Zanardi, the former Formula 1 driver, won two gold medals on a handcycle.

Formula E

The newest arrival is electric. Formula E, having run its London race in a park and then through an exhibition centre in the Docklands, announced in June 2026 that from the start of its Gen4 rules cycle, the 2026-27 season, the London E-Prix would move to Brands Hatch. Dates and layouts belong on the series' own calendar, not here, but the significance is plain enough: it puts an FIA world championship for single-seaters back at the circuit for the first time since 1986. The background is in our piece on Formula E's three London homes.

Where to watch: the best place at Brands Hatch for each kind of day

On an Indy circuit day the answer is almost anywhere, which is the point of the bowl. Some places are better than others.

Paddock Hill Bend. The bank and grandstand on the outside of the corner give the view everybody has seen in photographs: cars cresting the rise, dropping away below and climbing Hailwood Hill on the far side. Go here for the start. The first lap of any race is decided in front of you, and the place fills early for that reason.

Druids. The banking around the hairpin is the best spot for anyone who wants to see overtaking at close range and slow speed. Cars arrive in a queue, brake to a crawl, and leave side by side. In the trees it is also the most sheltered part of the circuit when the wind comes down the valley.

The South Bank. This is the long spectator bank on the far side from the main road, facing the pits across the hollow. From its upper part a spectator can follow a car through Graham Hill Bend, along the Cooper Straight, through Surtees, McLaren and Clearways, and across the valley can see it go through Paddock and up to Druids as well. That is close to the whole Indy lap from one place. It is the best choice for a first visit and for anyone with children, because nothing disappears for long.

On a Grand Prix circuit day

The long lap changes the calculation. Stay in the bowl and the field vanishes for most of every lap; walk out to the loop and you give up the overview.

The walk is worth making at least once. Footpaths lead from the Surtees end of the South Bank out along the circuit to Hawthorn Bend, where the speed is of a different order from anything on the Indy lap, and on to Westfield, Dingle Dell and Sheene Curve. The banks there are low and the fences close. A superbike over the rise at Sheene, or a GT car through Hawthorn, is a more vivid thing seen from ten yards than any view across the valley.

Allow time. It is a good twenty minutes on foot from the paddock to the far end of the loop, longer in a crowd, and there is less in the way of catering and cover out there. A sensible plan on a big day is to watch the opening laps from Paddock or the South Bank, walk the loop during the middle races, and be back in the bowl for the finale.

Getting there and away: the A20, the stations and the exit queue

By road the circuit could hardly be easier to find. From London and most of the country the route is the M25 to junction 3, the Swanley interchange, and then the A20 south-east for a few miles. From the Kent coast it is the M20 as far as Wrotham and then the A20 north-west over the hill. There is no back way in. Everything arrives on the same road.

That is the difficulty. The A20 is a single carriageway through West Kingsdown, and on the morning of a touring car or superbike meeting the queue to turn in stretches back towards the motorway in both directions. Regulars arrive early, well before the first race, and treat the paddock walk as part of the day.

By train

No railway station is within sensible walking distance. Eynsford is the closest on the map, with Farningham Road and Longfield not much further, but Swanley is the station to aim for: it has the most frequent trains from London, and on the Sundays of big meetings the circuit has run a shuttle bus from it. Otherwise the last stretch needs a taxi, booked ahead on a major weekend because there are not many. The A20 has no continuous pavement suitable for the walk and it should not be attempted.

The end of the day

Leaving is slower than arriving, because arrival is spread over three hours and departure is not. When the last race finishes on a big day, tens of thousands of people walk to car parks that all empty onto one road.

The practical response shapes the last hour for a lot of spectators. Some leave before the final race and listen to it on the radio in the queue. Others do the opposite: stay in their seats, watch the podium, walk the pit lane if it is opened, and let the first wave go. An hour's wait at the circuit usually costs no more time overall than an hour stationary on the A20, and it is a better hour.

Brands Hatch is one of several circuits covered in the England section of this site; the rest of our motor racing coverage is collected on the motorsport hub, and the full list of English venue guides starts from the England index.