REALISING THE UK’S OVAL RACE AMBITIONS
Twenty years on: Britain’s fastest race track
Occasionally in motor racing you have to remind yourself that something actually happened. For a long time the thought of America’s top-level single-seater racing coming to the UK, and on an especially built oval track, was tantalising. But it couldn’t actually happen, could it?
It did. In 2001 and 2002 at Rockingham Motor Speedway, a 1.5-mile circuit in Corby, Northamptonshire. The track opened 20 years ago this year.
Sadly, though, racing engines at Rockingham have since fallen silent, as competition stopped at the end of
2018 so the site could be used instead as a logistics hub.
And Rockingham’s tale is by now well-told. Its inaugural CART visit was disrupted by ‘weepers’, where water from previous heavy rain seeped through the surface. The crowd for CART’s second visit was down. CART departed and the track continued largely as a club venue using its infield layout – far removed from original intentions. Furthermore, for much of that time the place’s sense of drift, even decay, was noticeable.
Those close to the matter insist it wasn’t so simple however. Let’s start with the CART visits. “The major issue was that we had focused too much on earning substantial international TV revenues and not enough on making it a profitable UK-based business,” Guy Hands, the project’s major financier, tells Motorsport News.
“Today focusing on international revenues probably would work, but 20 years ago it was not the way you could make substantial sums of money; TV revenues were much less than they are today.”
Contrary to some belief too Rockingham found favour with the American fraternity, despite the ‘weeper’ embarrassment. “They initially liked the venue a lot,” Hands recalls. “It was incredibly fast, it was very attractive and it had an amazing stand with the opportunity to increase seating capacity for over 100,000.”
Darren Manning, who raced in the
2002 CART event in a patriotic Team St George entry, concurs to MN: “I think they [the CART drivers] all loved it. Obviously the weather and the weepers they had a lot of issues.
“It was definitely a challenging track and the teams like that. When you go to places like those types of NASCAR superspeedways that are super easy for a Champ Car or IndyCar to get round, you’re just a passenger! But at Rockingham you definitely drive it. As a driver you want to be making a difference.”
Also, again contrary to some testimony, there was reciprocal UK enthusiasm at Rockingham too. “It was extraordinary,” Hands remembers. “We ran out of merchandise within about 45 minutes on the opening day. We ran out of food a few hours later.”
“It was awesome,” Manning adds.
“It was my first big-time race. Even to this day I still get some hero cards and caps and pictures from people to sign of that Team St George car!”
CART as noted though didn’t return after its second Rockingham visit. “We weren’t willing to pay the fees they were requiring to continue to bring the show to Rockingham,” Hands explains. “It didn’t make economic sense for us. We had to get very substantial TV revenues to justify paying the fees that they wanted. It was as simple as that.” Hands then sold up for a mere £1.
The circuit had its own NASCAR-style series too, initially called ASCAR. And that didn’t skimp on the drivers, with none other than Jason Plato leading its impressive line-up. But the category didn’t last at Rockingham beyond 2007.
“It was in a time in the early 2000s when the internet was just getting going and streaming channels were just starting to get going,” says Manning, who was an ASCAR race winner in 2002. “But TV was still huge at that time and if you weren’t on the right channels [you weren’t seen]. If it all got started again right now it might be a different story.
“Drivers like myself and Darren
Turner and Plato, and [Nicolas] Minassian, were effectively getting paid to be in there, it wasn’t sustainable
“We should have focused on the UK” Guy Hands
for the guys that were paying the cheques.
“It was great fun but it was competitive, me and Jason and Darren, we had some real good ding-dong battles.”
Peter Hardman was the racing circuit’s most recent CEO. He got the role via an unusual route. A housing development near the circuit acquired the Rockingham venue to be able to control its noise output. A friend of Hardman’s later took over the development and asked Hardman to run the race track while all decided what to do next. Hardman had no cash to play with, but was left to his own devices and could reinvest what he generated.
He got some capital with a rates rebate and reduction, then got more income from renting out venue car parking and office space. Promotion was invested in for the first time in a while, and Rockingham even blazed a trail on circuit social media activity. The track was busy.
Hardman didn’t lack ambition either. “I looked at IndyCar [racing at Rockingham],” Hardman tells MN, “I know Zak Brown so I asked Zak to speak to the IndyCar people, the NASCAR people, and he said they’re interested but they want $10 million or whatever to come over.
“And it would have required a lot of money to spend on the track because you’d have to put padding all the way round the wall, the investment would have been £2-3m, so it just wouldn’t have been viable.”
Hardman nevertheless in his time nearly doubled Rockingham’s staff and sales, and made a profit in each of his last four years in the role. But he was aware throughout that the end was a matter of time.
“I always knew that it wasn’t going to stay as a track, or it was unlikely to, because of the 320-acre site, the land value on the site that big in Corby. The reality is 320 acres is worth a lot of money and the guys who acquired it didn’t pay for it, it came with a property deal so they ended up with a piece of land and you just happened to have a track on it.
“You’d have to be making £12m a year to make it a viable running a track on the land value alone. And there’s no way that the track [will raise that], even if you got some Goodwood-type events going.”
Yet the oval to the end retained its majesty, not least for the Pickups championship that almost alone in later years raced on that layout. “It was an awesome place,” Pickups boss Sonny Howard tells MN, “[it would] just take your breath away the second you drove in that gate, just knew what was coming.
“It had everything that we needed. I used to run race control with Nick Breed and it was good, they had staff there that were committed to it as well, you could see everything, everything was right, it was as in America.”
But convincing UK-based racers to make the leap to oval racing isn’t necessarily easy. Pickup racer Lea Wood, also formerly of the British Touring Car Championship, can attest. “I’ve got to be honest, I fell into that trap a few years ago because I wasn’t very keen for going round the oval,” he tells MN. “But then I had a taste for it and got the bug for it and, got to say, of all the racing that I’ve done including touring car racing it’s probably the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.
“The feeling of being on the edge of your seat for so long was just incredible, you’re running out 7000 revs for the whole race and the engine doesn’t drop below that.
“But it’s hard to get people to make the change isn’t it? There was a lot of trying but it didn’t succeed.”
Howard agrees: “Oval racing is a different breed of people, but there is a lot of people out there couldn’t understand and the clubs couldn’t understand what the racing was about. It was awesome racing. But you had to understand it.”
Which appears to be the rub. The Rockingham project was, so to speak, built from the top down rather than from the bottom up, which may have been an error. “It ended up like building a pyramid upside down,” Howard adds. “You built it upside down and a kid can push it over. It needed some grounding, and then bit by bit you stepped it up”
And Howard reckons he has a culprit in the Rockingham layout. “It was too big for the UK,” he says. “A mile-and-a-half is too big. If they’d have built [a] short oval then the place would still be going.
“The vision was there in the first place, it got lost in transit somewhere along the line. I say if they’d have made that into three-quarters of a mile or a mile circuit then you would have converted the public from short ovals. And you could have floodlit that; oval racing at its best is at night under lights.
“There are people out there that are still spending a lot of money on short ovals, and if they’d have built just one perfect track… It was so close, all of the drawings were already done.
“There should have been enough product so that it was on the oval all of the time. If it had been a bit shorter then you’d got things like Legends would be able to go round there, there was all sorts who could have raced there.”
Hands doesn’t entirely agree, but his thread of thinking is similar.
“It really wasn’t a question of having a smaller venue, we needed to have smaller ambitions,” he says. “We were aiming vastly too aggressively initially and trying to be successful immediately internationally.
“We should have had more moderate objectives, focused on the UK market first and built the track and seating arrangements for a local venue. We were trying to build the fastest and best track in the world and we would have done much better to have focused on providing something more suitable initially for the UK market.
“We got the business plan completely wrong; We should have focused on making it a venue for British motorsports fans. We were instead overly ambitious, aiming internationally and failing to aim sufficiently at the local audience.
“With the benefit of hindsight, we would have done a great deal differently and today I would have a site worth hundreds of millions as opposed to the £1 note I got for it.”