50 YEARS OF THRUXTON HISTORY
Thruxton has hosted motor racing for half a century. Paul lawrence traces the story of the hampshire speedbowl
It was on March 17, 1968 that Alistair Mchardy’s Special Saloon Hillman Imp won the first race on the 2.356mile Thruxton track as we know it. Unlike just about every other UK track, the layout has not changed in 50 years and the high-speed Hampshire track continues to deliver some of Britain’s very best motor racing.
However, the Thruxton story actually goes back to the early 1950s as three car race meetings were run on a makeshift 1.89-mile track on the old runways. It was August Bank Holiday 1952 when the former RAF Thruxton first hosted car racing as John Coombs won twice in a Cooper 500. On the same day, a young Roy Salvadori made his racing debut.
After just three events, car racing was curtailed on the poor track surface, although bike racing continued right through until 1965. Yet within two years, Thruxton was back in focus after the sudden closure of Goodwood in July 1966. The British Automobile Racing Club had used Goodwood as its home track for 18 years but now urgently needed a new venue as a base.
Negotiations were carried out in secret to bring a permanent track to the Thruxton airfield, and by the autumn of 1967 work started on building the current track layout, under the direction of the BARC’S Bob Clarke. A planned completion for March 1968 was incredibly ambitious but the BARC was very keen to run its Easter Formula 2 event at the new track after switching it temporarily to Silverstone in 1967. The track surface was completed between Christmas and the New Year and earth banks were dug into the chalky landscape to provide barriers. Early plans to site the pits and paddock in the dip before the run up Woodham Hill to the chicane were soon changed and work continued apace.
At the time, Grahame White was competitions manager for the BARC and he was heavily involved in the whole process, including organising a major international meeting at a track that was barely a month old.
“I had to work to convince the Formula 2 teams to come,” says White. “It was a huge risk running the F2 meeting at a completely unknown circuit, but it worked. All the F2 drivers liked it because it was quick and quite a challenge.”
Sadly, the opening F2 event was overshadowed by the death of Jim Clark at Hockenheim just a week earlier. The Thruxton F2 race ran over two heats and a final and it was Jochen Rindt who dominated in his Brabham BT23C. However, the gifted Austrian had a late scare when he slid off at the Club Chicane, crashed through an Exide Batteries hoarding and then rejoined, without even losing the race lead.
Rindt made the Easter weekend European F2 race his own in those early years, winning again in 1969 and 1970 before losing his life at Monza five months later in September 1970.
The early years of Thruxton marked a golden era and the track hosted 13 club race meetings in 1969. But the venue was already living on borrowed time, and by the summer of 1969 local opposition to the noise had built to the point that enforcement notices were served on the BARC by Hampshire County Council. The Thruxton Protection Society was prominent in the local fight against the track.
So began a period of great uncertainty as legal arguments raged and the matter came to a head with a public enquiry starting in July 1970. Graham Hill spoke on behalf of the circuit, but Jeremiah Harman QC for Hampshire County Council was not impressed, claiming that the circuit owner had: “Pursued a course both devious and energetic to obtain any advantage they could on the principle of gaining an inch and taking an airfield.”
Harman even went so far as suggesting that granting permission for racing to continue would eventually lead to Formula 1 Grand Prix racing in rural Hampshire, with the inherent noise and crowd issues.
Meanwhile, the circuit pushed ahead and planned a mammoth 17-meeting schedule for 1971, capped by the Easter F2 meeting. Event sponsor Yellow Pages commissioned a very impressive Jochen Rindt Memorial Trophy for the race, which was won by Graham Hill in a Brabham BT36, marking one of the final major single-seater wins of his career, aged 42. In front of a crowd estimated at 40,000, Hill won in a Rondel Racing entry in a field of 41 F2 cars.
The 1971 season also marked Thruxton’s longest car race when the 750 Motor Club ran the Birkett Six-hour Relay Race, while local drivers Brian Cutting and John Burbidge founded the Thruxton Racing Drivers’ School. It would later morph into the Ian Taylor school, headed by the late F3 racer.
Finally, in May 1972, came the outcome of the public enquiry, which could have closed the track with immediate effect. However, then Minister of the Environment Peter Walker decreed that racing and practising would only be allowed on 21 days a year. This decision was quickly followed by another legal challenge from local objectors and a last-minute out-of-court settlement finally reduced the number of race and qualifying days to just 12. It is a number that has hampered Thruxton’s development and use ever since.
At least racing could continue, although the severely limited use has always held back any ongoing investment in the circuit and its facilities. Despite these issues, a new pit garage complex was built in 1983 and this year a £2 million project has delivered the impressive new Thruxton Centre on the inside of the track at the head of the paddock area.
Under the new regime, racing continued but the oil crisis of 1974 cost the BARC the sponsorship required to run the annual F2 race. The race returned in 1975 when won by Jacques Laffite in a sequence of races that would keep Thruxton on the F2 calendar until the end of the category in 1984. A year later, a once-only Formula 3000 race was won by Emanuele Pirro, but the numbers did not stack up. A requirement to have a £100,000 prize fund for the race left the BARC losing £35,000 in 1985 and it was simply unsustainable for a circuit with such limited racing activity.
The demise of the annual Easter event signalled the end of Thruxton’s 17-year run as a major international venue. The Interserie sportscars ran in 1986, but support was modest. Instead, the venue’s future sustainability would look increasingly towards British Touring Cars and British Superbikes.
From Rindt’s first outright lap record of 1m16s set at Easter 1968, the lap times dropped constantly through the F2 era to stop at Johnny Cecotto’s 67.37s best in
1982. British F3000 moved the mark on to 62.75s by Philippe Adams in September 1993, but that was obliterated a month later when Damon Hill ran a high-speed demonstration in a Williams FW15C. He set a best lap in a stunning 57.6s, averaging over 147mph in the process. The car had been due to run at the circuit’s Silver Jubilee meeting that June, but refused to start. Frank Williams generously promised to send the car back in October and Hill’s mesmerising 15-lap run delivered the first sub one-minute laps in Thruxton history.
Away from the headline events, Thruxton still delivered outstanding racing with many epic slipstreaming contests invariably only being settled on the final rush up Woodham Hill. That section of track also delivered one of the most spectacular accidents in Thruxton history when Australian Charlie Cox rolled his Ford Mondeo 11 times during the BTCC meeting in May 1995.
“I’d never been on a circuit that flowed like this and I couldn’t believe how fast it was,” said Cox of his first encounter with Thruxton. “It wasn’t like anything at home in Australia. That day, up the hill to the chicane I hit the brakes as usual and it was like pulling the handbrake on. It rolled 11 times – we counted later – and eventually landed on the service road. I needed a pass to get back into the circuit!”
Although knocked around, Cox made a full recovery and returned to race at Thruxton. “For all that, it is still my favourite circuit,” he added.
Into the new millennium, the BTCC and British Superbikes have kept the fans coming back to Thruxton and action is invariably fast and furious on a track that rewards car control and bravado, but punishes errors. Dan Eaves made a piece of BTCC history when he won all three races in one day in May 2005 and BTCC grandees like Jason Plato and Andrew Jordan rate it as one of their favourite tracks.
When the track was last resurfaced, the notorious bump at the dauntingly fast Church corner was eased a little, but it remains one of the most challenging corners at any UK track. Add in an abrasive surface that can kill tyres on a warm day and you have a track that constantly delivers unpredictable races.
Over this weekend a very special meeting featuring classic and historic racing as well as demonstration runs of notable cars and bikes will be a fitting celebration of half a century of racing at this gem of a track.
With a very visible programme of expenditure and improvement on-going and passionate racers Bill Coombs and Patrick Blakeney at the helm, Thruxton has never looked in better shape. It is a fine place to go motor racing. ■