Donington Park Circuit: Layout, History and Spectating

The loudest thing at Donington Park is often not on the track. Cargo aircraft using East Midlands Airport pass low over the spectator banks, because the airport is next door and the circuit lies under its flight path. Underneath them is a motor racing circuit laid out in the grounds of an old estate at Castle Donington in Leicestershire, in the English East Midlands, about two miles from the M1.

Donington Park has two layouts. The National circuit is just under two miles round; the Grand Prix circuit adds the Melbourne Loop and comes to about 2.49 miles. It opened in 1931 as the first permanent park circuit in England, held four Donington Grands Prix before the war, lay silent from 1939 until Tom Wheatcroft reopened it in 1977, and has since staged one Formula 1 world championship race, the 1993 European Grand Prix that Ayrton Senna won, and twenty-three years of the British motorcycle Grand Prix. MotorSport Vision has operated it since 2017 under a Motorsport UK track licence.

Where Donington Park is: Castle Donington, the airport and the M1

Three counties meet within a few miles of the paddock. The circuit is in Leicestershire, in the district of North West Leicestershire. The River Trent, just to the north, is the Derbyshire boundary. Nottinghamshire begins a short way east, beyond the motorway. The postcode is a Derby one, which leads plenty of people to place the circuit in the wrong county.

Castle Donington itself is a large village on the slope above the Trent. The park lies to its south-west and was the deer park of Donington Hall, a Gothic house built in the 1790s that still stands inside the estate. The circuit uses the park's natural contours: a ridge on which the pits and the start line sit, and a valley into which the track drops and from which it climbs back.

The road that matters is the A453. It leaves the M1 at junction 23A for traffic from the south and junction 24 for traffic from the north, runs west past the airport terminal, and reaches the circuit gates within a few minutes. The A42 brings traffic from Birmingham and the south-west to the same junctions, and the A50 does the same job from Stoke and the Potteries. Few circuits in Britain are so close to so much dual carriageway. It is the single biggest practical advantage Donington has over its rivals, and it was the argument made, repeatedly, by everyone who ever tried to bring a Grand Prix here.

The Donington Park track layout: National and Grand Prix circuits

Both circuits run clockwise and both use the same pits. The difference is confined to the last half-mile.

• 1931Year the circuit opened
• 38Years without a race, 1939 to 1977
• 1Formula 1 world championship races
• 23British motorcycle Grands Prix

The motorcycle figure counts the seasons from 1987 to 2009 inclusive in which the British round of the Grand Prix world championship was held here. The Formula 1 figure counts world championship races only.

From the start line the lap goes to Redgate, down through Hollywood and the Craner Curves to the Old Hairpin, back up the hill by way of Starkey's Bridge, Schwantz Curve, McLeans and Coppice, and along Starkey's Straight on the top of the ridge. So far the two layouts are identical.

At the end of that straight is a chicane, the Fogarty Esses, which both layouts use. On the National circuit the lap ends a few yards beyond it at Roberts, a tight right that turns the car onto the Wheatcroft Straight and the start line. On the Grand Prix circuit the cars leave the Esses and carry on downhill to the Melbourne Hairpin before climbing back to a final right-hander at Goddards. The owner counts twelve corners on the long lap and ten on the short one.

	National circuit	Grand Prix circuit
Length	Just under 2 miles	About 2.49 miles
Direction	Clockwise	Clockwise
Final corner	Roberts, just after the Fogarty Esses	Goddards
Includes the Melbourne Loop	No	Yes
In use since	1977	1985
World championship Grand Prix, cars	None	1993

Why there are two

The circuit that reopened in 1977 was what is now the National layout. It was a good lap and too short. The motorcycle world championship set a minimum length for its circuits, and a track of under two miles did not meet it. In 1985 Wheatcroft added the Melbourne Loop, which took the distance to two and a half miles, and the British motorcycle Grand Prix arrived two years later.

The loop is not well regarded by purists. Everything up to the Esses is fast and continuous, and then the lap ends with two slow corners joined by short straights, built to add distance. The criticism is fair as far as it goes. It overlooks the fact that the slow corners are where the passing happens.

Which championship uses which layout has varied over the years and is a matter for each season's regulations. World championship motorcycle events have used the long lap. National car and bike series have used both.

Redgate, Hollywood and the Craner Curves

Start with the corner that looks easy. Redgate, at the end of the Wheatcroft Straight, is a long right-hander that turns the car through most of a half-circle. There is room on the way in, which tempts a driver to brake late and turn early, and that is the mistake, because the corner tightens and what matters is the exit. From Redgate the track runs downhill for the better part of half a mile without a braking zone, and every mile an hour lost at the exit is carried all the way to the bottom.

Hollywood comes next, a left-hand curve over the brow where the hill begins. Most cars and all bikes take it without lifting, and it matters chiefly because it sets the line for what follows.

Then the ground goes.

The Craner Curves are a fast left-hand sweep, steeply downhill, followed by a change of direction to the right as the track approaches the Old Hairpin. A racing car is flat out or close to it. A superbike is leaned over at very high speed with its weight pitched forward onto the front tyre, on a surface that falls away from it. There is no single difficult moment. The difficulty is that the corner goes on, that the car or bike is accelerating downhill the whole time, and that the correct line through the left determines whether the right-hand part at the bottom is possible at all.

What a missed line costs

Run wide in the first part of the Craner Curves and the options are bad ones. Lift, and the weight transfer on a downhill slope unsettles the rear. Stay on the throttle, and the car arrives at the direction change on the wrong side of the road with the Old Hairpin's braking zone already beginning. The grass on the outside slopes the same way the track does, so a car that leaves the tarmac keeps going. Motorcycle racers name this stretch among the most demanding in Britain, and time found here comes from commitment rather than horsepower.

Fred Craner, whose name it carries, was the secretary of the Derby and District Motor Club and the reason the circuit exists.

The Old Hairpin, Starkey's Bridge, Schwantz Curve, McLeans and Coppice: climbing back to the top

The Old Hairpin is not a hairpin. It is a right-hander of roughly ninety degrees at the lowest point of the circuit, taken in a middle gear, and the name is a survival from the narrower pre-war track. Arriving from the Craner Curves, a driver is braking while still turning and still going downhill, and the kerb on the exit is used to the last inch because the climb begins at once.

Under Starkey's Bridge the track kinks and starts to rise. The bridge and the straight on the far side of the circuit share a name. What follows was simply the run up to McLeans until the circuit named it for Kevin Schwantz, the Texan who won the 500cc race here four times, in three consecutive years from 1989 and again in 1994, and whose style, all elbows and late braking, made him the favourite of a British crowd that had few riders of its own at the front. Schwantz Curve is quick, uphill and taken with the car loaded sideways for a long time.

McLeans is the awkward one. A right-hander approached uphill, it invites late braking because the gradient helps to stop the car, and then punishes it because the corner is slower than it looks and the exit runs out of road. Front tyres that have been worked hard through the fast curves before it tend to give up here. On a motorcycle it is a favourite place for the front to tuck.

A short straight leads to Coppice, named for the wood beside it. The entry is over a crest and blind. The corner is a long right with two apexes, and it opens onto Starkey's Straight, the fastest part of the lap. That makes Coppice the most important corner on the circuit for lap time and for racing, since a car that gets it right can draw alongside before the chicane and a car that gets it wrong is a target for the whole length of the straight.

Corner	Layout	What it is
Redgate	Both	Long right-hander at the end of the start straight
Hollywood	Both	Left-hand curve over the brow of the hill
Craner Curves	Both	Fast downhill sweep, left then right
Old Hairpin	Both	Right-hander at the lowest point of the lap
Schwantz Curve	Both	Fast uphill curve after Starkey's Bridge
McLeans	Both	Uphill right-hander, slower than it looks
Coppice	Both	Blind, double-apex right onto the back straight
Fogarty Esses	Both	Left-right chicane at the end of Starkey's Straight
Roberts	National only	Tight right onto the Wheatcroft Straight
Melbourne Hairpin	Grand Prix	Slow right-hand hairpin at the foot of the loop
Goddards	Grand Prix	Tight right-hander onto the Wheatcroft Straight

The Fogarty Esses, the Melbourne Hairpin and Goddards: where races are settled

Starkey's Straight ends in the hardest braking on the circuit. The chicane was plain "the Esses" for decades before it was renamed for Carl Fogarty, the Lancastrian who won four World Superbike titles in the 1990s and filled the banks here whenever he raced. It is a left followed by a right over high kerbs, and it is the natural place to attempt a pass: a slipstream down the straight, a late move to the inside, and an argument about who has the corner.

On the National circuit only the right-hander at Roberts follows, and the line is a few hundred yards away. A great many touring car and superbike races here have been decided by who was braver, or luckier, at the chicane on the final tour, and a fair number have been decided afterwards by the stewards.

On the Grand Prix circuit there are two more chances. Out of the Esses the track drops down a short straight to the Melbourne Hairpin, a slow right-hander at the bottom of the loop. The braking zone is downhill and the inside line is always open to somebody willing to risk it. From the hairpin the track climbs again to Goddards, another slow right, slightly off-camber, with the pit wall and the finish line immediately beyond.

Three heavy braking zones in half a mile, each into a slow corner, at the end of a lap that has had almost none. This is why Donington produces close finishes. The fast part of the circuit strings the field out according to who has the best car or the most nerve, and the slow part gives whoever is behind three opportunities to undo it.

The pre-war Melbourne

The name is older than the loop. Melbourne is the Derbyshire town a few miles away, the one the Australian city is indirectly named after, and the pre-war circuit was extended towards it in 1937 with a long downhill straight to a hairpin and a steep climb back. The crest of that climb, Melbourne Rise, is where the German Grand Prix cars were photographed with all four wheels off the ground. The modern loop points the same way and borrows the name, but it is a different and much shorter piece of road.

1931 to 1938: England's first park circuit and the Donington Grands Prix

Racing on closed public roads was illegal on the British mainland. That one fact explains why the country's first purpose-built track, Brooklands in Surrey, was a concrete bowl on private land, and why by 1930 there was still nowhere in England to race on anything resembling a road.

Craner's solution was to borrow a park. The Donington estate belonged to Alderman John Gillies Shields, who agreed to let the motor club use its drives, and in 1931 a narrow course of a little over two miles was opened for motorcycles. It ran between trees, through a farmyard and under a stone bridge. Cars were admitted in 1933, once the track had been widened. It was lengthened in the mid-1930s, in time for the first Donington Grand Prix, and again in 1937.

1931 original course2.19miles

Mid-1930s extension2.55miles

1937 with Melbourne3.13miles

1977 reopened1.96miles

1985 with Melbourne Loop2.5miles

Approximate lap lengths at each stage of the circuit's development. The first three are the pre-war road course; the last two are the circuit rebuilt by Tom Wheatcroft.

Show the numbers

The length of a lap at Donington, 1931 to today

Item	Value
1931 original course	2.19miles
Mid-1930s extension	2.55miles
1937 with Melbourne	3.13miles
1977 reopened	1.96miles
1985 with Melbourne Loop	2.5miles

A proper road circuit wanted a proper race, and Craner organised a Donington Grand Prix from 1935. He could not call it the British Grand Prix. That title belonged to the Royal Automobile Club, which did not grant it, and the distinction still decides where these races appear in the record books, as our history of the British Grand Prix explains.

Year	Winner	Car
1935	Richard Shuttleworth	Alfa Romeo
1936	Hans Ruesch and Dick Seaman	Alfa Romeo
1937	Bernd Rosemeyer	Auto Union
1938	Tazio Nuvolari	Auto Union

The first two were good national events won by privately owned Italian cars. The second two were something else.

1937 and 1938: the German teams come to Leicestershire

In October 1937 Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union, the two state-supported German teams that had dominated European racing since 1934, brought their cars to England for the first time. Nothing in British experience had prepared the spectators. The cars had more than twice the power of the ERAs that were the best the home entrants could field, they reached speeds on the straights that looked absurd on a park road, and they left the ground at Melbourne Rise. Bernd Rosemeyer won for Auto Union. He was killed early the following year in a speed record attempt on a German motorway.

The 1938 race was arranged for the start of October and postponed for three weeks because of the Munich crisis; the German teams, already in England, were called home and then sent back. Tazio Nuvolari, then in his mid-forties, hit a stag during practice and won the race anyway in an Auto Union. Dick Seaman, an Englishman driving for Mercedes, finished third.

Those two afternoons are the reason Donington's name carried weight for the next forty years while the track itself rotted. People who had been there did not forget it. One of them was a teenager from Leicestershire called Tom Wheatcroft.

Requisitioned in 1939: the vehicle depot and thirty-eight years without a race

A Donington Grand Prix was in the calendar for the autumn of 1939. It was never run. When war was declared the park was taken over by the War Office and turned into a depot for military vehicles, one of the largest in the country, and for the next six years lorries, staff cars and armoured vehicles were parked in rows across the circuit and the parkland around it.

It was the estate's second war. Donington Hall had been a prison camp for captured German officers during the First World War, and one of them, the airman Gunther Pluschow, escaped from it in 1915 and got home, which no other prisoner held in Britain managed in that war. The requisition of 1939 was less dramatic and did far more damage.

Other circuits came out of the war better. Airfields became racetracks precisely because they had been built for something heavier than a racing car and then abandoned. Donington had the opposite experience. Its narrow road surface was broken up by military traffic, huts and hardstanding were built over parts of it, and the army did not leave in 1945. The depot stayed in use into the 1950s.

By the time the estate was handed back, the sport had moved on. Silverstone had the Grand Prix. Goodwood, Aintree and Brands Hatch had the international meetings. The War Office did not give the park up until 1956. There were proposals to revive Donington in the years that followed and none came to anything, and the land went back to farming. Sections of the old track survived as farm roads, cracked and overgrown, with the stone bridge still standing over a lane that led nowhere in particular.

It stayed that way for a generation. The gap between the last pre-war race and the first post-war one was thirty-eight years, longer than the whole competitive life of Brooklands.

Tom Wheatcroft's rescue: buying the estate in 1971 and reopening in 1977

Wheatcroft had made a fortune as a builder in the post-war housing boom. He spent a good part of it on racing: he ran cars for young British drivers, most closely Roger Williamson, whose death in the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix affected him deeply, and he bought historic Grand Prix cars at a time when few people wanted them.

In 1971 he bought a large part of the Donington estate, circuit included, from the Shields family. The price usually quoted is £100,000. His intentions were two, and they went together. He wanted somewhere to keep the cars, and the Donington Collection opened in 1973 in a building beside the old track, growing into the largest display of Grand Prix cars anywhere until it closed in 2018. Its rows of Vanwalls, BRMs and McLarens were, for forty-five years, a reason to visit Donington on a day when nothing was racing. And he wanted the circuit back.

The second took six years. Rebuilding the track was the easy part for a man who owned a construction company. The delay was legal: objections from residents, a public inquiry, and a long dispute over rights of way across the park. Racing finally returned in 1977 on a circuit that followed the pre-war course closely from Redgate round to Coppice and then departed from it, with a new straight along the ridge and a chicane in place of the old run to Melbourne.

What he wanted next

He wanted a Grand Prix, and said so to anyone who would listen. He applied for one for years. The circuit acquired European Formula 2 races, touring cars, sports cars and, after the Melbourne Loop was built, the motorcycle world championship. The Formula 1 race stayed out of reach, because Britain already had one and the calendar had no room for a second.

Then, for 1993, a race planned for a new circuit in Japan fell through, and there was a gap in April.

11 April 1993: the European Grand Prix and Senna's opening lap

It was Easter Sunday, it was cold, and it rained. The crowd was smaller than Wheatcroft had hoped. Those who came saw the lap that is still shown whenever anyone wants to explain what Ayrton Senna could do that other drivers could not.

The context matters. The Williams-Renaults of Alain Prost and Damon Hill were the class of the field in 1993, with more power and cleverer electronics than anything else. They filled the front row. Senna's McLaren had a customer Ford engine and started fourth, behind Michael Schumacher's Benetton. On a dry track he would not have seen the Williams cars after the first corner.

1. 1The startSenna is squeezed towards the pit wall by Schumacher and Karl Wendlinger's Sauber goes past both. He reaches Redgate fifth.
2. 2Down the hill from RedgateHe takes a wider line and goes past Schumacher as the road drops towards the Craner Curves. Fourth.
3. 3Craner CurvesHe goes round the outside of Wendlinger on the fast downhill sweep, on the wet part of the road. Third.
4. 4McLeansHe closes on Hill up the hill and passes him on the inside under braking. Second.
5. 5Melbourne HairpinHe catches Prost on the short straight and outbrakes him into the hairpin. First.
6. 6Start lineHe completes the lap in the lead and is already pulling away.

The order of events on the opening lap of the 1993 European Grand Prix, on a wet track. Senna started fourth and led across the line at the end of the lap.

Four passes in a little over a minute and a half, three of them on cars that should not have been catchable, each in a different corner by a different method. The Craner Curves move is the one drivers talk about. Nobody overtakes there in the dry. In the wet, on the outside, on the first lap of a Grand Prix with cold tyres, it should not have been possible.

The rest of the afternoon

The race that followed was decided by the weather, which changed its mind repeatedly. The track dried, was rained on, dried again. Each change meant a choice between grooved wet tyres and slicks, and the Williams team chose badly and often: Prost came into the pits seven times. Senna stopped four times. He stayed out on slick tyres on a damp track when others would not, and by the finish had lapped every car except Hill's.

He won by well over a minute from Hill, with Prost third and a lap behind. A young Rubens Barrichello, in only his third Grand Prix, ran as high as second in a Jordan before his fuel system failed near the end. Senna also set the fastest lap of the race on a tour during which he drove through the pit lane without stopping, there being no pit lane speed limit that year and the pit lane at Donington cutting the final corner. The sponsor was a video game company, and the trophy presented on the podium featured its cartoon hedgehog.

The rules that now govern a wet race, from safety car starts to mandatory tyres, are set out in our guide to what Formula 1 does when it rains. Almost none of them existed in 1993, which is part of why the race looked the way it did.

Formula 1 did not come back. One Grand Prix in ninety-odd years is a thin record on paper, and it is still the first thing anybody says about the place.

The motorcycle years: the British Grand Prix and the first World Superbike round

If cars gave Donington its legend, bikes gave it a living. The circuit suits them. It is narrow by modern car standards and flows in the way riders like, and the banks put spectators close.

The British round of the motorcycle world championship moved here from Silverstone in 1987 and stayed for twenty-three seasons. Through most of that time it was one of the big weekends of the British summer, with the campsites full.

Year	Event	What happened
1987	British Grand Prix, 500cc	Eddie Lawson wins the first Grand Prix held at Donington
1988	World Superbike Championship	The first round of the new series is held here in April
1988	British Grand Prix, 500cc	Wayne Rainey takes his first premier-class win
1998	British Grand Prix, 500cc	Simon Crafar takes the only premier-class win of his career
2000	British Grand Prix, 500cc	Valentino Rossi takes his first premier-class win
2008	British Grand Prix, 125cc	Scott Redding wins at the age of fifteen
2009	British Grand Prix, MotoGP	Andrea Dovizioso wins the last Grand Prix held at Donington

The table shows a pattern. Donington was a place for first wins. Rainey, who would become a three-time champion, got his here; so did Rossi, in 2000, his first season on a 500; so did Dovizioso, on a day of changing conditions when the faster men fell. Crafar's is the purest example, a single afternoon in 1998 when a New Zealander on a satellite team's Yamaha beat Mick Doohan and never won again.

British riders did not win the main race. Not once in twenty-three years, which is a strange statistic for the home Grand Prix of the country of Mike Hailwood and Barry Sheene. Redding's 125cc victory in 2008, which made him the youngest Grand Prix winner the sport had then had, was the loudest moment the home crowd got.

The Grand Prix left for Silverstone after 2009, for reasons bound up with the events of the next section. The later history, including a contract with a Welsh circuit that was never built, is told in our page on the British MotoGP at Silverstone.

3 April 1988: a new world championship starts here

The World Superbike Championship, for racing versions of motorcycles that could be bought in a showroom, held the first round in its history at Donington Park in the spring of 1988. Davide Tardozzi won the first race on a Bimota and Marco Lucchinelli the second on a Ducati. The series was an American idea and a gamble; by the mid-1990s Fogarty's success had made its British rounds some of the best-attended bike meetings of the year.

Superbikes have kept coming back, at both world and national level. The domestic championship, whose format and title-deciding final rounds are covered in our guide to how British Superbikes works, has made Donington one of its regular stops.

The Formula 1 deal that failed in 2009, the dug-up track and the recovery

The worst two years in the circuit's modern history began with what looked like its greatest success.

In 2007 the Wheatcroft family leased the circuit on very long terms to a new company, Donington Ventures Leisure. At the British Grand Prix weekend in July 2008 it was announced that the race would move from Silverstone to Donington from 2010, on a seventeen-year contract. Tom Wheatcroft, by then in his eighties, had the Grand Prix he had wanted since he was a boy.

It required a new circuit in all but name: a new pit and paddock complex, a lengthened lap, tunnels, grandstands and roads, at a cost reported to be well over a hundred million pounds. The money was to come from investors, later from a bond issue. The timing could not have been worse. The agreement was signed weeks before the banking crisis of autumn 2008.

1. 12007The Wheatcroft family grants a long lease of the circuit to Donington Ventures Leisure.
2. 2July 2008A seventeen-year contract to hold the British Grand Prix from 2010 is announced.
3. 32009Construction starts. The existing track is cut through for a tunnel and the infield is excavated.
4. 4Autumn 2009The funding deadlines pass without the money being raised and the Grand Prix contract is lost. Tom Wheatcroft dies on 31 October.
5. 5November 2009The leaseholder goes into administration, leaving a circuit that cannot be raced on.
6. 6December 2009 to 2010Control returns to the Wheatcroft family, the track is repaired and racing resumes in 2010.
7. 72017MotorSport Vision takes over the running of the circuit on a long lease.
8. 82021MotorSport Vision buys the freehold of the Donington Hall estate.

The sequence of events at Donington Park between the lease of 2007 and the present owner's purchase of the freehold. Years are those in which each step took place.

Work began regardless. During 2009 contractors cut through the track to build a tunnel and dug out a large area of the infield. Deadlines for proof of funding were set by Formula 1's commercial rights holder, extended, and missed. In the autumn the contract was withdrawn and the British Grand Prix returned to Silverstone on a long agreement of its own. The leaseholder went into administration in November. Wheatcroft had died less than three weeks earlier.

What was left was a circuit with a trench across it. The motorcycle Grand Prix had already been signed away to Silverstone on the assumption that Donington would be busy with Formula 1. For some months it was a reasonable question whether Donington Park would ever reopen.

Putting it back

The Wheatcroft family took the circuit back and repaired it. The hole was filled, the track was relaid, and racing resumed during 2010, with the major national championships and the World Superbike round returning after that. It was a recovery made on a small budget, and the facilities stayed dated, but the track was open.

In 2017 the business passed to MotorSport Vision, which already owned Brands Hatch in Kent and several other English circuits, together with a long lease on the estate; in 2021 MSV bought the freehold of the Donington Hall estate outright. MSV did what it had done elsewhere, spending on the surface, the spectator areas and the buildings and filling the calendar. The plain judgement on the episode is that Donington was badly damaged by an attempt to make it something it could not afford to be, and has been better run since as what it is.

Where to watch at Donington Park, and how the site works

The best view at Donington is the one from the bank beside the Craner Curves. Stand high on the grass on the outside of the circuit, somewhere below Hollywood, and the cars come over the brow from Redgate, sweep down the hill in front of you, brake for the Old Hairpin at the bottom, and climb away on the far side of the valley towards McLeans. That is close to a third of the lap. It is also the fastest third, which is why the photographers gather there.

Redgate. The outside of the first corner is the place to be for a start. Thirty cars or bikes funnel into one right-hander, and the banking gives a clear view back up the grid. It is less interesting once the field has spread out.

McLeans and Coppice. The top of the hill on the far side is quieter and gives a view of cars under load in two awkward corners. From Coppice a spectator can watch the whole length of Starkey's Straight.

The Esses and the Melbourne Loop. For anyone who wants to see overtaking, this is the end of the circuit to choose. The banks around the chicane and the hairpin are close to the track, the speeds are low enough to follow what is happening, and on the last lap of a touring car or superbike race this is where it is decided. The price is that nothing else is visible.

The paddock and the infield

The pits and paddock are on the inside of the circuit along the Wheatcroft Straight, and at most national meetings the paddock is open to spectators, reached by the crossings to the infield. Much of the infield is taken up with car parking, exhibition space and the hard surfaces used for other events.

A boundary shared with an airport

East Midlands Airport is next door in the literal sense. It is one of the busiest cargo airports in the country and much of that traffic flies at night, which has an odd consequence for the circuit. Most English tracks operate under strict limits on noise because their neighbours bought houses in what they took to be quiet countryside. Donington has noise conditions as well, but it sits beside a runway and a motorway, and the argument with the surrounding area has been less bitter than at circuits where racing is the only loud thing for miles.

For a spectator the airport is mostly a curiosity, and occasionally a help: its bus links and hotels serve the circuit as well. The nearest railway station is East Midlands Parkway, a few miles away on the main line, and neither it nor the stations at Derby, Long Eaton and Loughborough is close enough to walk from.

And with a rock festival

The estate has a second life. Monsters of Rock was held at Donington from 1980 to 1996, and the Download Festival has been held there since 2003, on the land beside the circuit, with tens of thousands of people camping in the surrounding fields each June. The racing calendar is built around it. For a period on either side of the festival the venue is given over to staging, fencing and recovery, and no racing takes place.

That mixture of uses is what pays for the circuit. A track that depended on gate money from a dozen race meetings a year would not have survived 2009.

Donington is one of several English circuits with a guide on this site. The rest of our motor racing coverage is gathered on the motorsport page, and every venue guide in the section can be reached from the England hub.