by Robin Dunk
The banking is what does it. A slab of cracked 1907 concrete, thirty feet high in places, rising at an angle no modern engineer would sign off on. Standing on it, it doesn’t take much to imagine a car materialising round the bend at speed: Malcolm Campbell wringing out an early Blue Bird, or a Napier-Railton hunting another lap record. Underneath the actual quiet, you can just as easily hear the clatter of a factory floor turning out Wellington bombers a few hundred yards away, or the roar of a Merlin overhead as another Hurricane went up on test. Aviation and its history have long been both a personal and a professional interest of mine, and Brooklands is one of those rare places where you’re genuinely standing in the footsteps of giants of both motoring and aviation. Often, it turns out, they’re the very same people.
The whole week had rather a planes, trains and automobiles theme to it, as it turned out. I’d travelled the length of the country by train, south to north and back south again, and commuted into the airshow itself by train each day, though for a stretch of the week I’d also hired what turned out to be a really zippy hybrid Fiat 500, the kind of car you just don’t see brought into Australia; great for firing down the country lanes that dot the south of England, and seemingly just as at home at 90mph on the motorway on the way back. The day before, I’d taken the train out to the Didcot Railway Centre, the Great Western Society’s living museum of the GWR outside Oxford, an immersive day in its own right, watching restored steam and diesel locomotives run passengers back and forth on short historic rides past the old engine shed.
What struck me was the sheer variety rolling through the gates all day. Marques you’d rarely see back home in Australia sat elbow to elbow with the everyday: Facel Vegas, Aston Martins, a scattering of Shelby Cobras, both genuine and replica, parked a few feet from once-mundane family saloons that somebody, somewhere, has spent decades quietly keeping alive. It’s not often you get that whole cross-section in one paddock. What struck me most, though, was that these cars were driven, not hidden. Multi-million-dollar machinery sat wheel to wheel with cars carrying rust along their sills and crazed paintwork on the bonnet, and nobody seemed to mind either way. Cars and camaraderie were clearly the theme of the day, not the depth of anyone’s wallet or the rarity of what they’d turned up in. I did lose count of the E-Types at some point; there seemed to be more of them on show than there are letters in the alphabet.
For anyone who hasn’t made the trip: Brooklands is the site of the world’s first purpose-built motor racing circuit, opened in June 1907 just outside Weybridge, built in nine months flat by a local landowner, Hugh Locke King, who financed the whole thing out of his own pocket and very nearly ruined himself doing it. The stress of it wrecked his health partway through construction, and it was his wife Ethel who saw the job through and led the opening procession around the new track in her own car. It’s an origin story that deserves to be better known: the world’s first purpose-built race circuit exists because one very determined woman refused to let her husband’s folly become his ruin.
Vickers had been building aircraft on the infield since the First World War, and by the 1930s the company’s design office at Brooklands was where engineer Barnes Wallis worked out the geodetic lattice framework that gave the Wellington bomber its extraordinary ability to survive being shot full of holes and keep flying. A section of that lattice, all silver diamonds and rivets, is on display in the Aircraft Factory hall, and it’s worth ten minutes of anyone’s time. Wallis went on to sketch out his bouncing bomb concept in that same office, though the actual testing happened well away from Surrey, skipping across Chesil Beach. Down the road, Hawker had its own arrangement: components built at their Kingston factory, then trucked over to Brooklands for final assembly and test flying. More than three thousand Hurricanes went out through those sheds, a fifth of every Hurricane ever built, and a fair share of the aircraft that did most of the shooting down in the Battle of Britain. Racing itself never recovered from any of it. The circuit was requisitioned in 1939 and bombed in 1940, and by the time the war ended the banking was covered in temporary hangars and nobody could justify the cost of putting it back. Vickers and its successors kept building aircraft on the site for another forty years; the racing never returned.
Decades later, more of Concorde was built at Brooklands than anywhere else in the country: close to a third of every airframe, the nose and tail sections, made here by the British Aircraft Corporation before being trucked to Filton or flown out to Toulouse for final assembly. It’s an odd, brilliant combination, race track and aircraft works side by side, and the museum now sits across both. Walk through the Aircraft Factory hall today and you’re in the actual building where it happened, not a recreation of it.
A note for the aviation and motorsport enthusiasts reading this: the Rolls-Royce R engine from the Supermarine S6A, which I’d viewed hanging from the roof of the Solent Sky museum in Southampton only two days before, went on to power Malcolm Campbell’s own record runs in Blue Bird. Rolls-Royce later developed that same R design into the 37-litre Griffon engine, which powered many of the later Spitfire variants.
They’d even invited me back to Brooklands for a Thursday evening show called Cool Flo, where Ralph or the family’s VW camper (known, rather brilliantly, as Vanos à la Playa) usually makes an appearance. The invitation came a few days too late; I was booked for the flight home. Still, it’s exactly the kind of connection a couple of grille badges and a keyring are meant to make, and exactly why getting young people into these cars, rather than just talking about doing so, matters.
Worth knowing: Brooklands Museum is run by an independent charity, the Brooklands Museum Trust, and receives no government funding. It survives on gate money, memberships, and days out exactly like this one. 2026 also marks a hundred years since Britain’s first Grand Prix, held right there on the old circuit, and the Museum’s centenary event on 8 August is shaping up to be a big one for anyone in the area. The Museum is well worth the detour if you’re ever visiting that corner of England, and the Summer Classic Gathering itself is open to any vehicle registered up to 1996, entering via the Campbell Gate off Brooklands Road. Bring a few spare keyrings too. You’ll use them.
