by David Finlay (6 July 2006)
Although the UK now has a massive influence on international motorsport, things were not always this way. It was not until the 1950s, for instance, that British teams became regular front-runners in Grand Prix racing. Half a century before that, in the pioneer days, we were minor players.
Part of the reason for that was the refusal of the authorities to sanction the closure of public roads for motorsport purposes. It stands to this day; an Act of Parliament is still required to suspend the speed limit on the public highway. And even this is a fairly recent development. In the early 20th century, even considering such a thing would be to think the unthinkable.
So, while other countries developed their racing heritages on closed roads, the opportunities for British drivers to compete wheel-to-wheel were severely limited. Practically their only option was to race at Brooklands, the world's first track of its kind, purpose-built on H F Locke King's estate at Weybridge in Surrey.
All kinds of machinery raced at Brooklands between 1907 and 1939, but the largest, most intimidating and best-known are the subject of Bill Boddy's new book,
Brooklands Giants: Brave Men And Their Great Cars. This is actually a combination of two books which have been published before. The original
Brooklands Giants was published second, in 1995, but it appears here first, since the cars it describes generally appeared in the very early days.
Boddy's requirement for inclusion here is that a car should have had an engine capacity of not less than ten litres, or more than four times that of a current Grand Prix machine. "Giants" indeed.
The second part of the present volume consists of Boddy's 1992 work,
Aero-Engined Racing Cars At Brooklands. Here there is no capacity limit but the requirement, as the title suggests, is that the unit must have come from an aeroplane. This was easy enough to achieve after World War I, when aero engines, no longer required for fighting duties, were plentiful and cheap.
The cars described here were quite varied, but a common thread is soon revealed. A typical high-performance Brooklands car was enormous, produced staggering power for those days, produced staggering torque for
these days, had practically no brakes, was based on a crude and often alarmingly flexible chassis, tore tyres to shreds and was about as dangerous as could be imagined.
Imagination was perhaps the last thing their drivers needed. What mental state was required to hurl these brutes round a fiercely banked circuit that was in places so bumpy the entire car would leap off the ground in mid-corner, all the while unsure that there were enough brakes to prevent it from literally jumping out of the venue after the chequered flag had been waved?
They were awesomely quick, too, as you'll gather from the fact that several of the cars mentioned here were also Land Speed Record Holders. The fastest-ever Brooklands lap was run by John Cobb in his 24-litre Napier-Railton at an average of 143mph. Justifying the book's subtitle, Cobb was clearly an uncommonly brave man, and so too were the likes of S F Edge, Ernest Eldridge, Malcolm Campbell, Kaye Don, Parry Thomas and so many others.
There were also brave women. Boddy devotes some space to Kay Petre, the pretty and slightly-built lady with the eyes of a true racer, who drove a 10.5-litre Delage round the track at an average of just under 135mph - a shade faster, in fact, than Cobb had previously managed with the same car.
Brooklands Giants records amazing events, and the text is backed up by a wonderful selection of period photographs. It should be a terrific introduction to the Brooklands world, but unfortunately there are various things which make it difficult for a reader without prior knowledge of the scene to break in.
Bill Boddy is the world's leading journalistic authority on Brooklands - or if he isn't, I can't imagine who is - but his writing style has always been that of the insider, laying out a vast array of facts and leaving the reader to appreciate the atmosphere by reading between the lines. His touch is not light (my heart always sinks when I see that a paragraph begins, "There was an amusing story concerning . . . ") and there is quite a lot of repetition. We don't, for example, need to be told the history of the 10.5-litre Delage's carburation twice in two pages.
More repetition comes from the fact that the two original books have been stitched together very loosely. The section explaining the Brooklands background is valuable, but no so valuable that we need to read it twice. And the first-half chapter on the monstrous Fiat
Mephistopheles reappears as the opening of another chapter on the same car in the second half.
True Brooklands fans, I imagine, won't mind any of that, but newcomers to the story may find themselves struggling.
Brooklands Giants: Brave Men And Their Great Cars, by Bill Boddy, is published by Haynes at £35.00. ISBN 1 84425 315 5. More details at
www.haynes.co.uk.