Brooklands Race Track: The World's First Motor Circuit

The concrete at Weybridge was finished in the early summer of 1907, and on 17 June a line of motor cars led by Ethel Locke King in an Itala drove onto it for the first time. Brooklands, on her husband's Surrey estate, was a banked oval 2.75 miles round and a hundred feet wide, and it was the first track in the world designed and built for motor racing.

It was used for racing, record-breaking and testing for thirty-two years. The last meeting was held on 7 August 1939, the site became a wartime aircraft factory, and in 1946 it was sold to Vickers-Armstrongs without a race having been run there since. The circuit is no longer complete. A substantial part of it survives, including the steep Members' Banking, and can be visited at Brooklands Museum, which occupies the old paddock and clubhouse on Brooklands Road in Weybridge.

What Brooklands race track was, in plain terms

A motor course, in the language of 1907, modelled on a horse racecourse and built on a scale nobody had attempted. The Outer Circuit was a rough egg shape with two banked curves joined by one long straight and one shorter kinked section. A second straight cut up through the middle to give races a finish in front of the enclosures. The whole surface was concrete. The name was simply that of the estate, low-lying farmland beside the River Wey between Weybridge and Byfleet.

• 1907Year opened
• 2.75Lap of the Outer Circuit in miles
• 100Width of the track in feet
• 143.44Outright lap record in mph

Dimensions of the Outer Circuit as built in 1907 and the outright lap record as it stood when racing ended. The record is an average speed in miles per hour.

One honest qualification belongs with the claim in the title. A horse racecourse near Melbourne in Australia had laid out a small track for motor cars slightly earlier. Brooklands was the first place built for nothing but motoring, the first with banking designed to be taken at full speed, and by a distance the first on this scale. Every later speed bowl took something from it: Indianapolis, which opened two years afterwards, Monza in 1922 and Montlhéry outside Paris in 1924.

It mattered for a second reason that is easy to overlook. Brooklands was the only permanent circuit on the British mainland for a quarter of a century. Until Donington Park admitted cars in 1933, a British driver who wanted to race on a track at home, as opposed to a beach or a hill, had one choice. The habits formed there shaped British motor racing for a generation, and they were not all good habits.

The site was also an aerodrome from 1909 and an aircraft works from the First World War, which in the end is what finished it as a racing venue. The two halves of its history are told in separate sections below, though at the time they shared the same gates.

Why it was built: a 20 mph limit and no road racing on the mainland

In 1907 it was illegal to drive faster than twenty miles an hour on any public road in Britain. The Motor Car Act of 1903 had set that figure, and it stayed in force until 1930. The law was widely ignored and energetically enforced, with police timing cars over measured distances from behind hedges.

Racing on the road was out of the question. Closing a public highway for a race needed an Act of Parliament, and Parliament had no intention of passing one for the mainland. When Britain had to host the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1903 the race went to Ireland under special legislation. The Tourist Trophy went to the Isle of Man, whose own parliament was more accommodating.

France, Italy and Germany had no such difficulty. Their manufacturers raced from city to city and, later, round long circuits of closed public roads, and they learned from it. British makers had nowhere to run a car flat out for more than a few seconds, and it showed in the results.

Hugh Locke King was a wealthy landowner with an estate at Weybridge and an interest in motoring. The usual account is that he travelled to Italy to watch a road race in 1905, found no British car in contention, and was told by those he asked that British firms could not compete because they had nowhere to test. He decided to provide somewhere. The plan was settled in 1906, on his own land, with his own money.

It was meant from the start to be a testing ground as much as a racecourse. Manufacturers could hire it by the hour. Record attempts could be timed officially. Engineers could run a car at sustained high speed and see what broke. That practical purpose outlasted every other use the track had, and the British motor industry leaned on Brooklands as a proving ground until the day it closed.

There was nothing public-spirited about the limits on who could come in, however. Brooklands was a private members' club with enclosures, and the pricing kept it that way.

Building it: concrete laid by hand in under a year

Work began in the autumn of 1906 and the track was open the following June. Around fifteen hundred men were employed at the peak, many of them navvies who lived in huts on the site. They felled woodland, shifted the course of the River Wey, moved earth by the trainload and built up two great curved embankments from the sandy Surrey soil.

The design came from Colonel H. C. L. Holden of the Royal Artillery. He started from the speed he wanted cars to be able to hold and worked out the banking from that, so that a car at the right speed would go round with no steering effort at all. The result was a track a hundred feet wide with banking that rose to nearly thirty feet above the inner edge at the Members' end and somewhat less on the longer Byfleet curve. The curve of the surface steepened towards the top, so the faster a car went the higher it ran.

Concrete was a choice forced by the shape. Tar and asphalt would not stay on a slope that steep. So the surface was laid in concrete, about six inches thick, directly onto the earth, in sections poured and levelled by hand. Where the Members' Banking had to cross the Wey it was carried on a bridge of reinforced concrete, which was advanced engineering for its date.

Two consequences followed, and both lasted as long as the track did. The first was the bumps. Concrete laid in bays on settling earth does not stay flat, and Brooklands grew rougher every winter. Cars at speed left the ground, and photographs of big machines with all four wheels in the air on the Members' Banking are not exaggerations. Each winter was spent patching, and the patches made new bumps.

The second was the bill. The original estimate was a fraction of the eventual cost, commonly given as about £150,000, and the difference came close to ruining Locke King. His wife's family helped to keep the project afloat. Ethel Locke King took a large part in running the place for the rest of her life, and the procession on opening day had her at its head for good reason.

The Brooklands banking and the layout of the circuit

Cars ran anticlockwise. A lap of the Outer Circuit went like this.

From the Fork, where the two routes divided, the track swung left onto the Members' Banking, the tighter and steeper of the two curves, which wrapped around the hill where the members' enclosure stood and passed under a footbridge. It came off the banking onto the Railway Straight, about half a mile of level concrete beside the main line from London to Southampton, where passengers on passing trains had a free view. Then came the Byfleet Banking, a much longer and shallower curve that carried the cars round the far end of the estate and back towards the aircraft sheds. A flatter reverse curve returned them to the Fork.

The Finishing Straight branched off at the Fork and ran uphill through the middle, past the paddock and the clubhouse, to rejoin the Members' Banking. The slope was there to help with stopping. With that straight included, the course offered three and a quarter miles of track.

Circuit	First used	Length
Outer Circuit	1907	2.75 miles
Test Hill	1909	352 feet
Mountain Circuit	1930	1.17 miles
Campbell Circuit	1937	2.26 miles

Riding the banking

A dotted line was painted fifty feet up from the inner edge, and laps were measured along it. The fast way round was higher than that. Big cars ran within a few feet of the lip of the Members' Banking, where the drop on the other side was into trees, and the skill lay in placing the car on the right line coming off the banking so that it did not snake across the Railway Straight. The bump where the banking crossed the river launched the heaviest cars into the air once a lap.

It was a specialised kind of driving and it bred a specialised kind of car: enormous engines, often taken from aeroplanes, in long narrow chassis with little in the way of brakes. They were magnificent and they had almost nothing in common with what was winning Grands Prix on the Continent.

The Mountain and Campbell circuits

By 1930 the organisers knew that flat-out lapping was falling behind what the sport had become elsewhere. The Mountain Circuit was the first answer: a short lap marked out with barriers that used the Finishing Straight and the Members' Banking and turned sharply at the Fork, giving two real corners. The Campbell Circuit, opened in 1937 and named after Sir Malcolm Campbell, who had a hand in its design, went further. It was a proper road course laid across the infield with new corners, joined to part of the old banking.

Both came late. By then Donington had the international races, and Crystal Palace had a road circuit in London.

Records before races: Edge's 24 hours and Lambert's hundred miles in an hour

The first great event at Brooklands was not a race. On 28 June 1907, eleven days after the opening, Selwyn Edge set out to drive a six-cylinder Napier round the track for twenty-four hours without relief.

Edge was the leading British racing driver of the day and Napier's chief salesman, and the run was a publicity exercise of a very modern kind. Two more Napiers circulated with him, each shared between two drivers. Through the night the inner edge of the track was marked with hundreds of lanterns and flares burned along the top of the banking. He covered 1,581 miles at an average just under 66 mph, well beyond the existing record, and stopped only for fuel, tyres and food. The distance was not beaten for seventeen years.

Two things came out of that night besides the record. The fresh concrete was damaged and had to be repaired before the first race meeting. And the people of Weybridge discovered what an unsilenced six-cylinder engine sounds like at three in the morning. Complaints about noise dogged the track from then on. They led eventually to a ban on running at night and to the compulsory "Brooklands can", a large silencer with a fishtail outlet that every competing car had to carry.

One hundred miles in sixty minutes

The record the public cared about most was the hour. To cover a hundred miles in sixty minutes on a track that punished tyres and chassis was the motoring equivalent of the four-minute mile, and several manufacturers were chasing it.

Percy Lambert did it on 15 February 1913, in a streamlined Talbot with an engine of about four and a half litres, which was small by the standards of the track. He covered 103 miles and 1,470 yards. The car had been prepared for efficiency over brute power, and that was the point Talbot wanted to make.

The record was taken from him by a French car later that year. On 31 October Lambert went out to get it back, a rear tyre failed on the banking, and he was killed. He is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London.

Brooklands also held the world land speed record three times, the last of them in 1922, when Kenelm Lee Guinness drove a 350-horsepower Sunbeam to 133.75 mph. No land speed record has been set on a closed circuit since. Cars had become too fast for any track, and the record went to beaches and then to salt flats.

Racing borrowed from the turf: handicaps, silks and the right crowd

Nobody in 1907 knew what a motor race meeting ought to look like, so the Brooklands Automobile Racing Club copied the one model of a paying sporting crowd that it knew. It copied the racecourse.

The officials were hired from the turf. There was a paddock, where cars were paraded. Races were given names like the Marcel Renault Memorial Plate and prizes were quoted in sovereigns. At the earliest meetings the cars carried no numbers: drivers wore coloured silk smocks and caps, like jockeys, and spectators were expected to tell them apart by their colours. That lasted a season. From a hundred yards a driver crouched behind a bonnet is not as visible as a man on a horse, and numbers were painted on.

The handicap survived. It became the defining feature of Brooklands racing and the main reason the track's results mean so little to anyone looking back at them.

1. 1Form is assessedThe handicapper studies each car's known lap times from earlier meetings and from practice.
2. 2Start times are fixedEach entry is given a start time, with the slowest car leaving first and the fastest, the scratch car, leaving last.
3. 3Cars leave one at a timeThe starter releases each car against a stopwatch, so a field might take a minute or more to get away.
4. 4The field closes upIf the sums are right, every car arrives at the finishing line together at the end of the last lap.
5. 5The winner is re-handicappedA car that wins is given less start at its next meeting, which rewarded drivers who hid their true speed.

The general method used at club meetings throughout the life of the track. Individual races varied in distance and in how the start was arranged.

The man who did the sums was A. V. Ebblewhite, known to everyone as Ebby, who served as starter, timekeeper and handicapper for nearly the whole life of the track. He was very good at it. Finishes with three or four cars abreast across a hundred feet of concrete were common, and that was the spectacle people paid to see.

The cost was that a Brooklands win proved little. A modest car with a generous start could beat the fastest machine in the country, and drivers were widely suspected of holding back in one race to earn a better mark in the next. Continental racing, run from a massed start with the first car home the winner, was a harsher and more honest test. The judgement of most historians is that the handicap habit kept British racing entertaining and parochial for longer than was good for it.

Then there was the slogan. The club advertised Brooklands as the place for "the right crowd and no crowding", and meant it. Admission was not cheap, the members' enclosure on the hill was a social fixture of the London season, and attendances at ordinary meetings were modest for a venue of that size. The track was built with room for a vast crowd and seldom needed it.

The first British Grands Prix and the long-distance races that followed

Scratch racing did come, in the 1920s, and with it the events for which the track is best remembered.

Race	First run	What it was
JCC 200 Miles	1921	The first long-distance race in Britain, for light cars
British Grand Prix	1926	The RAC's first Grand Prix, repeated in 1927
Double Twelve	1929	A 24-hour sports car race split into two days of twelve hours
BRDC 500 Miles	1929	A flat-out handicap on the Outer Circuit
JCC 1,000 Miles	1932	A two-day race for production-based cars
JCC International Trophy	1933	A massed-start race with handicapping built into the course

The Grands Prix were held on 7 August 1926 and 1 October 1927. Since the Outer Circuit had no corners worth the name, artificial ones were made out of sandbanks on the Finishing Straight. French Delages won both. The RAC did not run a third, and the title was not used again until 1948, at an airfield in Northamptonshire. That story, and everything that came after it, is in our history of the British Grand Prix.

The Double Twelve was Brooklands answering Le Mans with one hand tied. A 24-hour race was impossible because of the ban on night running, so the Junior Car Club ran twelve hours on a Friday, locked the cars away overnight under guard, and ran twelve more on the Saturday. The Bentley team that dominated Le Mans in those years, whose record there is covered in our guide to British winners at Le Mans, treated it as a home fixture and won it in 1930.

The 500 Miles was the opposite kind of event: the biggest cars in the country, round the Outer Circuit, as fast as they would go for as long as they would last. For a period in the 1930s its winning averages were higher than those of the Indianapolis 500, and it was the hardest race in Britain on machinery.

The cleverest idea belonged to the International Trophy. Everyone started together, and at the Fork on each lap the cars were sent through different channels according to engine size, the fastest class taking a tight detour and the slowest a nearly straight run. The crowd saw a real race and the handicap was built into the road. It was the best format the track devised.

The Brooklands lap record: John Cobb and the Napier-Railton at 143.44 mph

The outright record for the Outer Circuit was the track's blue riband, and by the 1930s only a handful of cars were capable of attacking it. All of them were built for that purpose alone.

Tim Birkin, Bentley, 1932137.96mph

Oliver Bertram, Barnato-Hassan, 1935142.6mph

John Cobb, Napier-Railton, 1935143.44mph

Gwenda Hawkes, Derby-Miller, 1935135.95mph

Average speeds for a flying lap. The first three bars are outright records in the order they were set, with the intermediate records of 1934 left out; the fourth is the fastest lap recorded by a woman driver, set in 1935.

Show the numbers

Fastest laps of the Brooklands Outer Circuit in the 1930s

Item	Value
Tim Birkin, Bentley, 1932	137.96mph
Oliver Bertram, Barnato-Hassan, 1935	142.6mph
John Cobb, Napier-Railton, 1935	143.44mph
Gwenda Hawkes, Derby-Miller, 1935	135.95mph

John Cobb was a London fur broker, a big and quiet man who had grown up a few miles from the track. In 1933 he commissioned a car from Thomson and Taylor, the engineering firm based inside the circuit, to a design by Reid Railton. Its engine was a Napier Lion, a twelve-cylinder aero engine with its cylinders in three banks of four, displacing just under twenty-four litres. The car had brakes on the rear wheels only.

Cobb took the record from Birkin's Bentley in 1934 and improved it himself. Oliver Bertram then raised it to 142.60 mph in August 1935. On 7 October Cobb replied with a lap in 69.44 seconds: 143.44 mph. Nobody went faster in the four seasons that remained.

The figure is permanent. A record on a working circuit is a challenge to the next car. This one is a closed entry, because the track on which it was set has had sections removed and the lap can no longer be driven. Cobb's time will stand for as long as anyone keeps the list.

The Napier-Railton twice won the BRDC's long-distance race on the Outer Circuit and took long-distance world records on the salt at Bonneville. After the war it had an odd second career testing aircraft braking parachutes. It now belongs to Brooklands Museum, is kept in running order and is driven on the surviving banking on special occasions.

Cobb went on to hold the land speed record at just under 400 mph. He died in 1952 on Loch Ness, attempting the water speed record.

The women who raced and set records at Brooklands

Women drove at Brooklands from the second season. A ladies' race was held in 1908 and won by Muriel Thompson in an Austin. The Brooklands club then declined to run another for many years. The opening came through the other clubs that hired the track for their own meetings in the 1920s, which accepted women's entries, and by the early 1930s the main club's races were open as well.

What followed was the most visible generation of women racing drivers Britain has had.

Kay Petre was born in Canada and stood under five feet tall. Photographs of her beside the 10.5-litre Delage she raced in 1935, with the pedals built up so she could reach them, are among the best-known images of the track. She lapped at 134.75 mph in it. Her career was ended in 1937 when another car struck hers during practice.

Gwenda Hawkes, who set her records as Gwenda Stewart and took the name Hawkes on her marriage in 1937, was a record-breaker by trade and did much of her driving at Montlhéry. In August 1935, days after Petre's lap, she took a front-wheel-drive Derby-Miller round at 135.95 mph. No woman lapped Brooklands faster.

Doreen Evans came from a family that ran an MG dealership and raced as a team. She was competing at Brooklands in her teens and was part of the all-women MG team sent to Le Mans in 1935.

Elsie Wisdom and the Australian Joan Richmond did something none of the others managed: they won one of the major races outright. In 1932 they shared a Riley in the 1,000 Miles and beat the entire field.

The speed badges

The club awarded a badge to any driver who lapped the Outer Circuit at 120 mph or more under official timing, and a second, rarer one for 130 mph. They were small enamelled things and fiercely prized, because they could not be bought or talked into. The 130 mph badge went to a very short list of drivers. Two of them were Hawkes and Petre.

These women were not a novelty act. The lap speeds were set on the same concrete, over the same bumps, in cars as heavy and crude as anyone else's, and the badge was awarded on the stopwatch alone.

The other Brooklands: flying schools, Vickers and Hawker

A wide flat field enclosed by a private track, under an hour from London by train, was what the first British aviators needed. A. V. Roe built a shed beside the Finishing Straight and made a series of short hops in a biplane of his own design in 1908. Whether they counted as the first powered flights by an Englishman in England was argued over for decades and was never officially accepted. The track's management was unimpressed either way and asked him to leave.

Attitudes changed quickly. From 1909 the centre of the circuit was cleared and levelled as an aerodrome, sheds were let to constructors, and by the years before the First World War Brooklands was the busiest flying ground in the country. Sopwith began there. Vickers ran a flying school. A large share of the pilots who went to war in 1914 had learned on the grass inside the track.

The factories came with the war. Vickers took over a works on the edge of the track in 1915 and stayed for more than seventy years. The Vimy bomber in which Alcock and Brown made the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic in 1919 was built at Brooklands. Hawker, the successor to Sopwith, assembled and test-flew its aircraft there, and the prototype Hurricane made its first flight from the aerodrome on 6 November 1935.

For twenty years racing and aviation shared the estate without much friction. Aircraft took off over the Byfleet Banking between races, and meetings sometimes ended with a flying display.

The Second World War ended the balance. Vickers built Wellington bombers at Brooklands, 2,515 of them, and Hawker produced Hurricanes on the other side of the field, about a fifth of all that were made. The factories made the site a target. On 4 September 1940 a German raid hit the Vickers works in daylight and killed nearly ninety people.

Aircraft manufacture continued after the war with the Viking, the Viscount, the Valiant and the VC10, and sections of Concorde were made there. The works closed at the end of the 1980s. Measured by years of use or by people employed, Brooklands was an aircraft factory for longer than it was a race track.

August 1939 to 1946: the last meeting, the wartime factory and the sale to Vickers

Nobody at the Bank Holiday meeting on Monday 7 August 1939 knew it was the last. The programme was an ordinary one, a mixed card of short races of the kind the club had run for years. War was declared less than four weeks later.

1. 17 August 1939The Brooklands club holds its August Bank Holiday meeting, the last race meeting on the track.
2. 2September 1939War is declared and the site is requisitioned for aircraft production by Vickers and Hawker.
3. 31940 onwardsTrees are planted in the concrete and the track is painted and covered to disguise its outline from the air.
4. 4Wartime buildingHangars and workshops go up on the track itself, and part of the banking is cut away for access.
5. 5January 1946Shareholders of the owning company vote to sell the whole site to Vickers-Armstrongs for 330,000 pounds.
6. 6After 1946The aircraft works expands across the estate and there is no further motor racing.

The sequence from the final meeting to the sale. Individual wartime alterations were made at different dates and are grouped here.

The outline of the track was the problem. From the air Brooklands was the most recognisable shape in Surrey, a pale concrete loop beside a railway line with two aircraft factories inside it. So it was hidden. Trees were planted through holes broken in the surface. The concrete was painted. Dummy buildings were put up on the banking.

The damage that mattered was done by the factories themselves. Buildings went up on the Finishing Straight and on sections of the Outer Circuit. A stretch of the Byfleet Banking was removed to let aircraft be moved across to dispersal areas outside the track. By 1945 the circuit was overgrown, built upon, cracked by six winters without maintenance and broken in at least one place.

It could have been repaired. The cost would have been heavy at a time when concrete, labour and money were all rationed, and the company that owned the track had no income. Vickers wanted the land. In January 1946 the shareholders voted to sell for £330,000.

The decision was resented at the time and has been regretted since, though it is hard to make the case that it was wrong. The Outer Circuit was obsolete before the war. Its surface was notorious, it could not hold a modern Grand Prix, and the sport's future lay with road circuits. What Britain lost was the place, with its buildings and its memory, more than a usable circuit. The disused airfields that replaced it, starting with Silverstone and soon after it the perimeter road that became the Goodwood motor circuit, were better for racing than Brooklands had ever been.

In the decades that followed more of the track went. A runway extension took another bite from the Byfleet Banking, and factory buildings, roads and later a retail park spread over the rest. What was left was later protected as a scheduled monument, and the protected area was extended in 2002.

What survives, and how to see Brooklands today

More than visitors expect. Roughly thirty acres at the northern end of the old site, containing the best of the surviving structures, have been in the care of Brooklands Museum since it opened in 1991.

Survivor	What it is	Condition
Members' Banking	The steeper of the two banked curves	A long section intact and walkable
Finishing Straight	The uphill straight past the paddock	Cleared of a wartime hangar and reopened in 2017
Test Hill	A 352-foot timed climb built in 1909	Complete and still used
Clubhouse	The 1907 club building	Restored, and the centre of the museum
Paddock and sheds	The area where cars were prepared	Restored, with period workshops
Byfleet Banking	The longer, shallower curve	Sections survive outside the museum grounds

The Members' Banking

This is what people come for, and no photograph prepares them for it. The surface is rough, patched and stained, and it rises from flat ground to something that cannot be climbed in ordinary shoes without using hands. Visitors can walk along the lower part. Standing at the bottom and looking up at the line the fast cars took, a few feet from the lip, is the quickest way to understand what a 140 mph lap meant.

The Test Hill

Built in 1909 so that manufacturers could measure a car's climbing power and its brakes, the hill rises in three stages, at 1 in 8, then 1 in 5, then 1 in 4 at the top. Timed climbs are still held on it at museum events, which makes it one of the oldest pieces of motor sport infrastructure in the world still doing its original job. It is the nearest thing at Brooklands to live competition, and a direct ancestor of the events described in our guide to hill climbs and sprints in the UK.

The Finishing Straight and the museum

For more than seventy years a wartime hangar stood across the Finishing Straight. In 2017 the museum moved it, restored the straight and reopened it on 17 June, the 110th anniversary of the track's opening, so that the banking, the paddock, the clubhouse and the hill are joined again as they were in 1939.

The museum's collection covers both halves of the site's history. The Napier-Railton is there. So are racing cars and motorcycles that competed on the track, a Wellington bomber recovered from Loch Ness, and a Concorde. Demonstration runs on the straight and the banking take place at events through the year, many of them organised with the clubs behind historic motor racing in the UK.

Two practical notes. The museum is at Brooklands Road, Weybridge, KT13 0QN, about a mile from Weybridge station on the line that still runs beside what was the Railway Straight. Opening times, prices and event dates change, and the museum publishes them itself.

The rest of the old estate is harder to read. Mercedes-Benz World occupies part of the former airfield, with its own handling tracks. A business park, shops and housing cover much of the remainder. Fragments of the Byfleet Banking stand among them, fenced and overgrown, and can be glimpsed from the roads that now cross the site. Circuits that took over the role Brooklands once had, among them Donington Park, are covered elsewhere in our guides, with more on the sport in our motorsport section and the full list of venues on the England hub.