British Grand Prix History: Brooklands to Silverstone
The history of the British Grand Prix in England, from Brooklands in 1926 to Silverstone today, with the Aintree and Brands Hatch years and the record book.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished British Grand Prix & Circuits26 min read
- First run
- 1926, Brooklands
- World championship round since
- 1950
- Championship venues
- 3
- Sole home since 1987
- Silverstone
Seventy laps of a redundant bomber station on the Northamptonshire border, on Saturday 13 May 1950, with King George VI watching from a temporary stand. That was the first race of the Formula One world championship, and it was the British Grand Prix. The race has been on the championship calendar in every season since. Only the Italian Grand Prix can say the same.
The event is older than the championship it opened. The Royal Automobile Club first ran a British Grand Prix at Brooklands in Surrey on 7 August 1926 and again in 1927, let the title lapse for two decades, then revived it at Silverstone in October 1948. Since 1950 it has been held at only three circuits: Silverstone, Aintree on Merseyside (five times between 1955 and 1962) and Brands Hatch in Kent (twelve times between 1964 and 1986). Silverstone has been the sole home since 1987 and, counting the 2026 race, has staged 60 of the 77 world championship British Grands Prix.
Where the British Grand Prix has been held, circuit by circuit
Four circuits, all of them in England, and all four built on land that was meant for something else: a Surrey estate, a wartime airfield, a racecourse and a natural bowl in a Kent field first used by cyclists. The whole venue list fits in a short table.
| Circuit | County | British Grand Prix years | Races to 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brooklands | Surrey | 1926, 1927 | 2 |
| Silverstone | Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire | 1948 to 1954, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1963, odd years to 1985, every year from 1987 | 62 |
| Aintree | Lancashire then, Merseyside now | 1955, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1962 | 5 |
| Brands Hatch | Kent | Even years, 1964 to 1986 | 12 |
Counting is where published histories part company. A total that starts in 1950 gives 77 races to the end of 2026. Add the two Brooklands races and the two Silverstone meetings of 1948 and 1949, which carried the title before any championship existed, and the figure is 81. Both are correct. They are answers to different questions, and a page that quotes one without saying which has usually copied it from somewhere else.
What the table cannot show is who was in charge. The RAC owned the title and, for most of the race's life, delegated the running of it: to the British Racing Drivers' Club at Silverstone, to the British Automobile Racing Club at Aintree, and under a different arrangement again at Brands Hatch. That division of labour explains a good deal of what follows, because every change of venue was also an argument between clubs, landlords and, later, the commercial rights holder. The sport's national governing body is now Motorsport UK, the successor to the RAC's competitions arm, and the Grand Prix is promoted by Silverstone under contract.
One geographical point is worth settling. Every British Grand Prix has been run in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have produced winners of it and have never hosted it.
Brooklands, 1926 and 1927: the RAC Grand Prix on banked concrete
Britain came late to Grand Prix racing because it had nowhere to hold one. Racing on public roads was illegal on the mainland, which is why the Tourist Trophy went to the Isle of Man and later to Ulster, and the only purpose-built track in the country was a banked concrete oval at Weybridge designed for flat-out speed rather than for cornering. Henry Segrave's win for Sunbeam in the 1923 French Grand Prix gave the RAC the standing to ask for a major international race of its own. Brooklands was the only place to put it.
The problem was the shape. A Grand Prix was supposed to test brakes and gearboxes, and the Outer Circuit tested neither. So for 7 August 1926 the organisers used the Finishing Straight, the flat strip that cut across the middle of the oval, and built two artificial corners on it out of sandbanks. Cars came off the Members' Banking, threaded the sand chicanes, and rejoined the main track. It was a contrivance and everybody knew it, but it gave a lap that needed slowing down for, and the race ran to well over 280 miles.
Nine cars started. The quickest were the green Talbots, built in France by a company with British ownership and led by Segrave, and they broke. The French Delages lasted, though at a price paid by their drivers: the exhaust ran so close to the cockpit that the pedals and the floor became too hot to bear, and the Delage men stopped repeatedly to cool their feet. The winning car was shared by Robert Sénéchal and Louis Wagner. Malcolm Campbell finished second in a Bugatti he had entered himself. Three cars were classified.
The 1927 race, on 1 October, was a formality. Delage had moved the exhaust to the other side of the engine over the winter, and Robert Benoist led a Delage one-two-three. He won each of the four major Grands Prix that year.
Why the title then lapsed
Then nothing, for twenty years. The 1.5-litre formula ended with the 1927 season, Delage withdrew, and Grand Prix racing across Europe slid into a period of free-formula events with thin entries. No British manufacturer was building a Grand Prix car. The RAC had an easier and more popular international race to promote in the Tourist Trophy, which moved to the Ards road circuit outside Belfast in 1928, and Brooklands had a full calendar of its own built around handicaps and long-distance sports car races. A British Grand Prix with no British car and a field of nine was an expensive way to watch a French team win. The track's own story, from its opening in 1907 to its wartime end, is told in our guide to Brooklands and its banked circuit.
Donington's four Grands Prix and why the record books keep them apart
By the mid-1930s there was a proper road circuit on the English mainland. Donington Park, in the grounds of a Leicestershire estate near Castle Donington, had opened to motorcycles in 1931 and to cars two years later, and its driving force, Fred Craner of the Derby and District Motor Club, wanted a Grand Prix. He got one in 1935. Richard Shuttleworth won it in an Alfa Romeo. In 1936 the Swiss driver Hans Ruesch won, sharing his Alfa with Dick Seaman.
Those two races were respectable national events with a few foreign entries. The next two were something else. In October 1937 the Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz teams came to Leicestershire, with their state-backed budgets, their supercharged engines of close to six litres and drivers that the British public knew only from newsreels. Spectators who were used to watching ERAs saw silver cars leave the ground over the crest at Melbourne. Bernd Rosemeyer won for Auto Union. The following year the race was postponed by three weeks because of the Munich crisis, the German teams having gone home and then returned, and Tazio Nuvolari won it for Auto Union on 22 October 1938.
No race run in Britain before the war mattered as much as those two. They are not British Grands Prix.
The reason is a matter of title, not of quality. The name belonged to the RAC as the national club recognised by the international federation, and the RAC did not confer it on Craner's event. The race was the Donington Grand Prix, an international meeting organised by a local club, and that is how the results were recorded at the time and have been listed since. Some histories treat the 1937 and 1938 races as British Grands Prix in everything except the name, which is fair as a description of their standing and wrong as a line in a table. The 1939 race was never run. The army took over the park as a vehicle depot, and it stayed out of use for racing until Tom Wheatcroft rebuilt it in the 1970s, a story covered in our guide to the Donington Park circuit and its layout.
Donington comes back into this history twice more, once for a single wet afternoon and once for a contract that nearly took the British Grand Prix away from Silverstone altogether.
Silverstone, October 1948: a Grand Prix on the runways
Peace left British motor racing with enthusiasm and no tracks. Brooklands had been sold to the aircraft industry. Donington was full of military lorries. What the country did have was airfields, hundreds of them, concrete and empty.
RAF Silverstone had been built in 1943 as a base for an Operational Training Unit, where crews learned to fly Wellington bombers. It had the standard three runways laid out in a triangle and a perimeter road running round the outside. In 1948 the RAC, under its chairman Wilfred Andrews, took a lease on it from the Air Ministry and gave a farmer named James Brown about two months to turn it into a circuit.
The layout he produced for 2 October 1948 was 3.67 miles long and unlike anything used since. Cars ran along the perimeter road, turned in towards the centre of the airfield down one runway, doubled back out again, and later repeated the manoeuvre on a second runway. For part of each lap two streams of cars were heading towards each other at speed with a short stretch of concrete between them, and canvas screens were put up so that drivers would not be distracted by what was coming the other way. The corners were marked with oil drums and straw bales. Ropes held the crowd back.
A very large crowd came, reported at the time as around a hundred thousand, and most of them queued for hours on country lanes to get in. They saw two new Maseratis driven by Luigi Villoresi and Alberto Ascari, which had arrived too late for official practice and started from the back, come through to finish first and second. Bob Gerard was third in an ERA built before the war. In the 500cc supporting race was a nineteen-year-old called Stirling Moss.
1949 and the corner names
The runways were dropped for 1949. The second Silverstone Grand Prix used the perimeter road alone, roughly three miles round, and that outline held for decades. Emmanuel de Graffenried won in a Maserati.
The names date from those first two years and they are a small map of the place and its organisers. Stowe is the school to the south. Maggotts comes from Maggot Moor, Becketts and Chapel from the ruined chapel of St Thomas à Becket, Abbey from the long-vanished Luffield Abbey. Woodcote and Club were the RAC naming corners after itself: its country club at Woodcote Park in Surrey and its clubhouse in Pall Mall. The Hangar Straight ran past the hangars. A fuller account of the site as it stands today is in our guide to Silverstone.
13 May 1950: the King, the Queen and three Alfa Romeos
The international federation announced a world championship for drivers to begin in 1950. It would be decided over seven events: six European Grands Prix and the Indianapolis 500, which no European team entered. Silverstone was given the first date and, with it, the courtesy title of Grand Prix d'Europe, an honour the federation handed to a different national race each year.
The RAC treated the day as a state occasion. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth attended with Princess Margaret, were introduced to the drivers before the start and watched from a royal box. No reigning monarch had been to a motor race in Britain before, and none has been to a British Grand Prix since. The BRM, the national racing car that a public subscription had helped to pay for, was demonstrated in front of the royal party because it was not ready to race.
As a contest the Grand Prix was over before it began. Alfa Romeo brought four examples of the 158, a supercharged 1.5-litre car designed before the war, for Giuseppe Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Luigi Fagioli and, as a guest in the fourth car, the Derbyshire driver Reg Parnell. Ferrari did not come. The four Alfas filled the front row of the grid, which was four cars wide.
Farina took pole position, set the fastest lap and won. Fagioli followed him home 2.6 seconds behind, and Parnell was third, some way back, in a car said to have struck a hare along the way. Fangio retired with an engine problem a few laps from the end. The next finisher, a French Talbot-Lago, was two laps behind.
The scoring that day was eight points for a win, then six, four, three and two, with a single point for fastest lap. Farina therefore left Northamptonshire with nine, and he was world champion by September.
One year later the same circuit produced a result that mattered more to the sport's future. On 14 July 1951 José Froilán González beat the Alfa Romeos in a 4.5-litre unsupercharged Ferrari, the first world championship victory for the team from Maranello. By then the BRDC had begun to take over the running of Silverstone from the RAC, an arrangement that became permanent in the early 1950s and that is still the reason the club owns the circuit.
Aintree's five races, 1955 to 1962
Mirabel Topham owned Aintree racecourse and wanted more than one big weekend a year out of it. In 1954 she had a three-mile motor circuit laid out around and inside the Grand National course, sharing its grandstands, so that spectators watched racing cars from seats built for steeplechasing. No other circuit in the country could match the facilities. The BARC ran the meetings, and the RAC agreed to bring its Grand Prix north in alternate years.
| Year | Winner | Car |
|---|---|---|
| 1955 | Stirling Moss | Mercedes-Benz |
| 1957 | Tony Brooks and Stirling Moss | Vanwall |
| 1959 | Jack Brabham | Cooper-Climax |
| 1961 | Wolfgang von Trips | Ferrari |
| 1962 | Jim Clark | Lotus-Climax |
Two of those five are among the most significant results in British racing history. On 16 July 1955 Mercedes-Benz finished first, second, third and fourth, and the driver at the front was Moss, a fifth of a second ahead of Fangio. It was his first world championship win and the first by a British driver in his home Grand Prix. Whether Fangio allowed it has been asked ever since. Moss said he never knew; Fangio said Moss had simply been quicker on the day.
Two years later Moss did it again in a green car. Tony Vandervell, an industrialist who made engine bearings, had built the Vanwall specifically to beat the Italian teams. At Aintree on 20 July 1957 Moss's own Vanwall began to misfire, so he took over the sister car of Tony Brooks, who was still recovering from injuries received at Le Mans and was glad to hand it on. Moss rejoined well down, caught the leaders as the Maserati in front broke, and won. The victory was shared between the two drivers, as the rules then allowed, and it was the first win for a British car in a world championship Grand Prix.
The later Aintree races belonged to the new order: Jack Brabham in a rear-engined Cooper in 1959, Ferrari's shark-nosed cars finishing one-two-three in the rain in 1961, and Jim Clark leading every lap in the monocoque Lotus 25 in 1962.
That was the last one. The Grand Prix went to Silverstone in 1963 and, when the alternate year came round, to Kent. There is no single documented cause, and accounts that offer one are simplifying. Brands Hatch had been extended to full Grand Prix length in 1960, had been bought by a company prepared to spend money on it and was an hour from London. The RAC owned the title, and the 1964 race was its to place. The future of the Aintree estate was in doubt, with talk of selling it for development. The full circuit closed to racing in 1964, though a shorter club loop survives and is described in our page on the Aintree circuit and its Grand Prix years.
The alternation years: Brands Hatch in even years, Silverstone in odd
From 1964 to 1986 the calendar followed a rule a child could remember. Even year, Brands Hatch. Odd year, Silverstone. It lasted twenty-three seasons, and the two circuits could hardly have been less alike.
| Year | Brands Hatch winner | Car |
|---|---|---|
| 1964 | Jim Clark | Lotus-Climax |
| 1966 | Jack Brabham | Brabham-Repco |
| 1968 | Jo Siffert | Lotus-Ford |
| 1970 | Jochen Rindt | Lotus-Ford |
| 1972 | Emerson Fittipaldi | Lotus-Ford |
| 1974 | Jody Scheckter | Tyrrell-Ford |
| 1976 | Niki Lauda | Ferrari |
| 1978 | Carlos Reutemann | Ferrari |
| 1980 | Alan Jones | Williams-Ford |
| 1982 | Niki Lauda | McLaren-Ford |
| 1984 | Niki Lauda | McLaren-TAG |
| 1986 | Nigel Mansell | Williams-Honda |
What Brands Hatch gave the race
Brands Hatch gave it a view. The circuit sits in a hollow, and from the banks around the start a spectator can follow a car through Paddock Hill Bend, where the road falls away under braking, up to the hairpin at Druids and back down again before it disappears on the long loop through the woods. The lap was about 2.6 miles and almost none of it was flat or straight.
It produced results to match. Jo Siffert's win in 1968 came in a Lotus entered by Rob Walker's private team, the last victory for a privateer of that kind. Two years later Jack Brabham ran out of fuel within sight of the flag and Jochen Rindt went past to win. The 1986 race, the last there, began with an accident at the first corner that ended Jacques Laffite's Grand Prix career and finished with Mansell beating Nelson Piquet in the spare Williams. A fuller account of the place is in our guide to Brands Hatch.
What Silverstone gave it
Speed. The airfield perimeter was fast and open, the corners were taken in high gears, and the average speeds were routinely the highest of the year in Britain and close to the highest anywhere. In 1969 Jackie Stewart and Rindt swapped the lead for lap after lap in each other's slipstream. In 1973 Scheckter spun at Woodcote at the end of the opening lap and took a large part of the field out of the race, which is why a chicane appeared there two years later. A hailstorm in 1975 sent most of the remaining cars off the road within a few minutes and the result was declared from a lap earlier. The 1977 race saw the first appearance of a turbocharged Renault and the debut of Gilles Villeneuve, and in 1979 Clay Regazzoni gave the Williams team its first victory.
The clearest statement of what the old Silverstone was came in qualifying in 1985, when Keke Rosberg lapped it at an average above 160 mph. No Formula One qualifying lap anywhere had been that fast.
Why Silverstone became the sole home from 1987
Rosberg's lap was part of the problem. Both British circuits were by then being measured against a standard they had not been built to meet, and only one of them had room to change.
The governing body of the time, FISA, had adopted a policy of long-term agreements with a single circuit in each country in place of the older habit of sharing a race around. Alternation had suited the clubs; it did not suit a championship being sold to television as a fixed annual tour. In 1986 Silverstone and the BRDC signed a multi-year agreement to stage the British Grand Prix from 1987. Brands Hatch, which had changed hands that same year, was left without one.
The comparison between the two was not close on the points that mattered to officials. Brands Hatch had little run-off, a cramped paddock, houses within earshot and banks that could not be moved back. Silverstone had hundreds of acres of flat land. The better place to watch a race had lost to the better place to rebuild, and it is hard to argue the decision was wrong even if the loss was real.
The rebuilding that followed has barely stopped.
- 1987. A slower left-right sequence was put in before Woodcote in place of the 1975 chicane.
- 1991. The largest redesign since 1949: the Maggotts and Becketts sweeps as they are now, a dip called Vale before Club, and a new infield section at Priory, Brooklands and Luffield.
- 1994 to 1997. Several corners were tightened or reprofiled in the safety review that followed the deaths at Imola.
- 2010. The Arena layout took the track right at Abbey and through a new loop, rejoining on what is now the Wellington Straight.
- 2011. A new pit and paddock building, the Wing, opened between Club and Abbey, and the start line moved there from its old position after Woodcote.
The lap is now 3.66 miles. The last corner of the new loop is called Aintree, and the Wellington Straight that follows it ends at a corner named Brooklands in the 1991 rebuild, which is the circuit's own acknowledgement of where the race had been before.
Staying put has not been comfortable. The 2000 race was moved to April and is remembered for car parks that turned to mud. Access roads were inadequate until a dual carriageway bypass opened in 2002. Each of those failures was used as an argument for taking the Grand Prix somewhere else.
Four British Grands Prix people still argue about
1976: James Hunt's win, taken away two months later
A collision between the two Ferraris at the first corner at Brands Hatch stopped the race and damaged Hunt's McLaren. The argument was over whether he had been running when the red flag came out, and so whether he could take the restart. The crowd made its view known loudly enough that the officials let him start. He won on the road. Ferrari appealed, and in September an international tribunal disqualified him and gave the victory to Niki Lauda. Hunt took the world title that autumn anyway, as our list of British world champions and their title years sets out, and won the British Grand Prix properly at Silverstone the following summer.
1987: Mansell, Piquet and the dummy at Stowe
Mansell stopped for fresh tyres because of a wheel vibration and rejoined close to half a minute behind his team-mate with under thirty laps left. He broke the lap record again and again, used more fuel than his gauge said he had, and arrived on Piquet's gearbox with three laps to go. On the Hangar Straight he feinted left, went right and took the lead into Stowe. The car ran dry on the slowing-down lap.
1992: the track invasion
Mansell won from pole by more than half a minute in the dominant Williams of that year. Before the rest of the field had finished, thousands of spectators were on the circuit, and his car was surrounded on its way back. Nobody was seriously hurt. It was celebrated at the time and regarded by officials as a very narrow escape, and the fences at Silverstone were higher afterwards.
2008: Hamilton in the rain
Lewis Hamilton started fourth on a wet track, took the lead early and won by more than a minute. Only two other drivers finished on the same lap. Wet-weather drives are often overpraised because the conditions flatter a result; this one stands up because every rival had the same choices of tyre and the same track and still finished a minute or a lap behind.
The Grand Prix that nearly moved to Donington Park
The race had come close to leaving before. In 1999 the company that owned Brands Hatch secured the rights to the British Grand Prix from 2002, on the assumption that it could rebuild the Kent circuit to the required standard. It could not get the work approved, and the outcome was an awkward compromise in which the new rights holder leased Silverstone from the BRDC and ran the race there. That arrangement ended early, and by 2004 the Grand Prix was for a time missing from the following year's provisional calendar before a shorter deal was agreed.
So the announcement at Silverstone on the weekend of the 2008 race was a shock but not a bolt from nowhere. Formula One's commercial rights holder had awarded the Grand Prix to Donington Park from 2010, on a long-term contract whose length was reported as ten years in some accounts and seventeen in others.
- July 2008A long-term contract to stage the British Grand Prix from 2010 is awarded to the leaseholder of Donington Park.
- 2009Work begins on a redesigned circuit in Leicestershire, but the money needed to complete it is never secured.
- October 2009A bond issue intended to fund the rebuild fails and the deadline set under the contract passes.
- November 2009The leaseholding company goes into administration, leaving the circuit partly dug up.
- 7 December 2009The British Racing Drivers' Club signs a 17-year agreement to keep the race at Silverstone.
- July 2017The club activates a break clause, which would end that agreement after the 2019 race.
- July 2019A new contract is announced, keeping the Grand Prix at Silverstone to 2024.
- February 2024The contract is extended to 2034.
The sequence of public announcements between 2008 and 2024. Contract fees were not published and are not given here, and the length of the Donington contract was reported differently at different times.
The Donington plan needed a rebuild reported at well over a hundred million pounds and a company with a short trading history to raise it during a banking crisis. It did not. By the autumn of 2009 the excavators had cut through the existing track for a tunnel and a new pit complex, the finance had failed to arrive, and the leaseholder went into administration that November. Donington was left unusable for racing for a season.
Silverstone's replacement contract was signed on 7 December 2009. It ran for 17 years, and its terms included an annual increase in the fee that the BRDC later said it could not sustain, which is why the club used its break clause in 2017 and negotiated again. The pattern is the one that governs every race on the schedule: the promoter pays to host, the fee rises, and a circuit with no government subsidy has to cover it from ticket sales.
A judgement, then. The British Grand Prix has stayed at Silverstone since 1987 less because nobody wanted to move it than because every alternative collapsed under the cost of building a second Silverstone.
The British Grand Prix record book, dated
Every figure here is as it stood after the race of July 2026, which Charles Leclerc won for Ferrari. The totals move each summer.
| Record | Holder | Figure after the 2026 race |
|---|---|---|
| Most wins, driver | Lewis Hamilton | 9 |
| Next most wins, driver | Jim Clark and Alain Prost | 5 each |
| Most wins, constructor | Ferrari | 19 |
| Second most, constructor | McLaren | 15 |
| First winner, 1926 | Robert Sénéchal and Louis Wagner | Delage |
| First championship winner, 1950 | Giuseppe Farina | Alfa Romeo |
| First British winner in the championship | Stirling Moss | 1955 |
Clark's five came in six seasons, in 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1967, and at three different circuits, which nobody else can now match. Prost's were spread from 1983 to 1993 and across four teams. For a quarter of a century five looked like the ceiling.
Hamilton reached it in 2017, his fourth win in succession. He passed it in 2019, added the 2020 race on three wheels after a tyre failed on the final lap, won again in 2021, and took a ninth in 2024. All nine were at Silverstone. Mansell's four, by contrast, include the 1986 race at Brands Hatch.
The home winners
Thirteen British drivers had won the race as a championship round by the end of 2026: Moss, Brooks, Peter Collins, Clark, Stewart, Hunt, John Watson, Mansell, Damon Hill, Johnny Herbert, David Coulthard, Hamilton and Lando Norris, whose win came in 2025. Two absences stand out. Graham Hill, twice world champion, never won his home Grand Prix. Jenson Button, champion in 2009, never finished on its podium.
Behind Ferrari and McLaren on the constructors' list come Williams and Mercedes with ten wins each on our count, and then Lotus with eight. Ferrari's lead rests on the early 1950s, when it won all six British Grands Prix run at Silverstone between 1951 and 1958, as much as on anything recent.
- 1926Year first held
- 77Championship rounds since 1950
- 3Circuits used since 1950
- 9Wins for the most successful driver
Counted to the end of the 2026 race. The championship total excludes the four races held before 1950.
Grands Prix on British soil that were not the British Grand Prix
A national Grand Prix is a title, and a country can host a world championship race without using it. England has done so four times.
| Year | Title | Circuit | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1935 | Donington Grand Prix | Donington Park | Richard Shuttleworth |
| 1936 | Donington Grand Prix | Donington Park | Hans Ruesch and Dick Seaman |
| 1937 | Donington Grand Prix | Donington Park | Bernd Rosemeyer |
| 1938 | Donington Grand Prix | Donington Park | Tazio Nuvolari |
| 1983 | European Grand Prix | Brands Hatch | Nelson Piquet |
| 1985 | European Grand Prix | Brands Hatch | Nigel Mansell |
| 1993 | European Grand Prix | Donington Park | Ayrton Senna |
| 2020 | 70th Anniversary Grand Prix | Silverstone | Max Verstappen |
The four Donington races of the 1930s were not championship events of any kind. The lower four all counted for the world title.
The European Grand Prix began as the honorary label Silverstone carried in 1950 and became, from the 1980s, a way of giving a second race to a country that already had one. Brands Hatch was handed the 1983 edition at short notice when a planned race elsewhere fell through, and Piquet's win there helped him to that year's title. It returned in October 1985, when Mansell took his first Grand Prix victory at his 72nd start and Prost secured his first championship on the same afternoon. Those two days are the reason Brands Hatch counts fourteen world championship races in its history and only twelve British Grands Prix.
Donington's turn came on 11 April 1993. It rained, as Easter in the East Midlands will, and Ayrton Senna went from fifth to first in the course of the opening lap. The race is remembered almost entirely for those ninety-odd seconds. It was the only world championship Grand Prix Donington has held.
The fourth case was an accident of the pandemic. With the 2020 calendar rebuilt around circuits that could run without spectators, Silverstone staged two races on consecutive weekends. The first, on 2 August, was the British Grand Prix. The second needed a different name, and since the championship had begun there seventy years before, it was called the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix. Verstappen won it for Red Bull.
Below championship level the list is longer. The International Trophy at Silverstone, the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch and the Gold Cup at Oulton Park were all Formula One races for much of their lives, run to the same rules with many of the same cars and no points at stake, and they died out in the early 1980s when the teams no longer had the time or the engines to spare. More on the wider sport is on our motorsport pages, and the other circuit and venue guides are gathered on the England hub.