England’s past is transparently accessible: It’s as if the bones show through modern life, and that applies to its motoring history as well.
Only the British would locate their national motor museum in the grounds of a 16th Century stately home or preserve the remains of a racetrack largely demolished for an aircraft factory at the start of World War II.
But a tourist can visit both of these landmarks near London in a weekend. Brooklands racetrack, the main site for establishing land-speed records before Bonneville Salt Flats became prominent, and the National Motor Museum are only about 40 miles apart.
Brooklands is near Weybridge, Surrey, about 20 miles south of Heathrow Airport. Built in 1907, it was the birthplace of British motor-racing, the first banked concrete track and scene of early derring-do.
A famous photo of Brooklands shows track record holder, 250-pound John Cobb, hunched over a steering wheel as big as a dustbin lid in his 500-horsepower, silver Napier-Railton Special.
He’s on the steep Members Banking at speed–maybe even on his record 143-m.p.h. lap–and all four wheels are off the ground. And that’s not an uncommon photo. Between the time Brooklands opened in 1907 and it closed in 1939, numerous cars were photographed at that bump.
That section of banking is all that remains–the rest has been flattened for offices in an industrial park. But the original clubhouse still stands in the center of the track, looking like a minor stately home.
It’s surrounded by ramshackle racing workshops, housing antique race cars and motorcycles, many with Brooklands connections. There’s Cobb’s Napier-Railton with its 500-horsepower W-12 aircraft engine in three banks of four cylinders. Beside it is Parry Thomas’ V-12 Liberty engine racer “Babs,” in which he died during a world land speed record attempt in 1927 at Pendine Sands in Wales. After his death “Babs” was buried in the dunes until Owen Wyn Owen tracked it down and restored it.
Other notables include Vieux Charles II, the huge 1912 Lorraine-Dietrich, and a Grand Prix Exhibition with a number of recent Formula One racers belonging to the likes of Ayrton Senna and Mika Hakkinen.
The fact that none of the workshops was demolished indicates the respect accorded to wealthy industrialist Hugh Locke King’s dream of a closed circuit to take racing off of public roads. It was built of concrete in nine months, and it’s more of a shrine to British motor racing than tracks such as Silverstone or Brands Hatch or the revived Goodwood or Donington Park.
Reopened in 1991 after being declared a Heritage Site (roughly equivalent to a national landmark) in 1987, Brooklands is a hub of motoring enthusiasm. The 33-acre heritage site echoes to the sounds of motor engines almost every weekend.
It’s divided into three parts. There’s the remains of the track and the one-in-four test hill used for a hillclimb on MG Day. The museum is spread through the old workshops and an ancient hanger celebrates Brooklands’ connection to Vickers aircraft, the last of which was made there in 1987.
J. Michael Phillips, Brooklands director and “clerk of the course” (track manager) calculates that motoring events will take place here 70 of 96 possible Saturdays and Sundays this year.
“Some events will be small like the Royal Enfield Motorcycle club with 35 motorbikes and as large as the [5,000-person] Brookland Association Reunion. I looked out my office window and counted 104 vintage Bentleys–about 5 million pounds worth.” That’s equivalent to about $8 million.
The MG club day in April attracted almost 600 cars from the earliest 1924 Morris Garages upright two-seaters to the latest 175-m.p.h. screamer sedans.
MG Day has particular meaning to Phillips, who drives a 1972 Midget to work daily. “It certainly isn’t a show car,” he said with a laugh. “I parked it out back.”
Phillips came to Brooklands after a career in the British army and landed in two feet of water when the track was flooded in November 2000.
“It caused 1.5 million pounds [$2.4 million] worth of damage two weeks after my appointment, and they asked me if I was still interested in coming,” he said, chuckling. “I said my last job was in Bangladesh and if we don’t have 20 million people displaced and we don’t have dead cattle floating past the window, this is OK.” Brooklands has 20 paid staff and 400 volunteers, said Phillips.
One of them is Norman “Spud” Boorer, who works most days at 85 and started with Vickers Aircraft in 1931 when he was 15. Boorer worked with Barnes Wallace, the inventor whose achievements included the “bouncing bomb” that destroyed Nazi dams in WW II and swing-wing jet fighters such as the F-111.
Among the 20-odd aircraft, Boorer’s particularly proud of “R Robert,” a Vickers Wellington bomber being reconstructed in the hanger. Only two Wellingtons survive, and this one was recovered in 1985 from Loch Ness in Scotland, where it was ditched in 1940.
Phillips says the museum hopes to host antique aircraft fly-ins.
“We get about 115,000 visitors a year, divided between motoring and aviation,” said Phillips. “But for every museum that opens in this country, one closes. At the end of the day, if we don’t pay our way we close.” Phillips remains optimistic.
“There’s a certain momentum about this place. We have a large association of 5,000 friends and within a year after the flood, we launched a 1.45 million pound appeal [fundraiser] to refurbish the aviation hanger.”
National Motor Museum
About 40 miles south of Brooklands, the National Motor Museum at Bealieu, Hampshire, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
It began with five old cars in the cavernous entrance hall of Palace House, the home of Lord Montague’s family since 1538 and one of the first stately homes to open to tourists in 1952.
The 7,000-acre estate sees 350,000 visitors a year with a combination of historical attractions. The motor museum is by far the youngest, competing with the 13th Century Cistercian Abbey, Victorian garden and Buckler’s Hard, the 18th Century shipbuilding village where men of war as big as the 74-gun HMS Illustrious were built from New Forest oak to fight Napoleon’s navy.
Then there’s the motor museum. If you can visit during an auto jumble (swap meet in the U.S.) or a periodic auction by Christie’s and Sotheby’s, you can find all kinds of cars and parts you don’t recognize. There’s also an extensive library for automotive research and a huge photographic resource.
The museum displays more than 250 vehicles with a view to explaining the development of the industry. Horseless carriage fans can see the earliest Fiat and Renault models dating from 1899 and capable of about 20 m.p.h. And while the 1886 Benz runabout is a replica created from factory plans, it’s accompanied by a note that Karl Benz drove the original 200 miles at 9 miles per hour to enter it in the Munich Exhibition of 1888.
The lineup of unfamiliar names is dizzying: 1896 Arnold Dog Cart, 1898 Canstatt Daimler, 1902 Arrol-Johnston, 1901 Columbia Electric, 1903 de Dion Bouton and 1907 Gobron-Brille.
Other oddities include the only surviving 1897 Berzet electric cab and the 1896 Pennington, which doesn’t run “and probably never did,” says museum supervisor Reg Parkes.
Parkes, 63, quit his job as an accountant to work at the museum 11 years ago and, though he’s due to retire in December, reckons he’ll still work three or four days a week.
London-Brighton Run
“This isn’t a static museum by any means,” he said, looking around the cars on display. “We have three to five cars in the London-to-Brighton run every year. Various cars go out on films or rallies, and the Rolls-Royces are hired regularly for weddings, especially the 1909 Silver Ghost.” The 60-mile London-to-Brighton run is an annual event, open only to cars made before 1905, the commemorates the abolishment of the English law requiring a man with a red flag to walk in front of a car.
Forty percent of the museum’s 250 vehicles belong to Lord Montague, said Parkes, 40 percent belong to the museum’s trust and the other 20 percent are lent from private owners “and should be here indefinitely.”
Keeping the collection running is a full-time job for two mechanics, with most parts being made from scratch for the veterans.
“About 20 percent of the cars don’t run, but they would with a bit of money spent on them,” said Parkes.
The museum’s latest project is for sports and racing cars, which will occupy a fifth of the space when it’s complete, said public relations officer Margaret Rowles.
“It’s a fine balancing act. We had to move about 40 commercial vehicles to fit the 25 racing cars. But we’re always trying to update the collection. This is the start of a complete revamp. We’ll be launching a national appeal,” said Rowles.
Formula One cars ride on a complex aluminum skeleton above the main floor, which houses the land-speed record collection. They include Ronnie Petersen’s 1977 Lotus JPS 78, Michael Schumacher’s 1994 Benetton World Championship car, Mika Hakkinen’s 1999 McLaren championship car and Damon Hill’s 1996 Renault championship car.
Visitors who ride a one-mile monorail through the grounds come through the museum and right over the high-speed display.
World land-speed record cars also include Henry Seagrave’s 1,000-horsepower 1927 Sunbeam, the first car to exceed 200 m.p.h.; 1929’s Golden Arrow, with which Seagrave regained the record at 231 m.p.h.; and Donald Campbell’s 1961 Bluebird, which took the world record at 403 m.p.h. in Australia but held it only for a year.
Right after that, jet cars took over and the latest and fastest in the museum is Richard Noble’s Thrust II, which took the record at 633 m.p.h. in 1983.
The rest of the museum combines mundane and landmark vehicles looking rather like a 50-year traffic jam with “blower” Bentleys and Rolls-Royce limousines next to Austins and Morrises.
A double-decker bus looms over a tiny and lethal-looking 1927 Morgan Super Sports, a Harrods electric van that was in service for 50 years until 1959, a 1922 Maxwell one-ton charabanc and an electric milk delivery truck, with a backdrop of a small-town high street.
Peculiar advertising vehicles such as the Outspan Orange Mini and the Worthington Beer truck that are shaped like the products they promote.
Periodic special displays have included the complete collection of James Bond cars, which was a phenomenal success, said Rowles, attracting people specifically for it. “We’d have to build a museum twice the size of the one we’ve got to show everything people want to give us,” said Rowles.
