Nothing left to prove: A farewell to Bruntingthorpe

Yet not once in all the years that I went to Brunters did anyone turn up or get on the radio saying “don’t do this”, “stop doing that” or anything else. By contrast, when I was road test editor of this magazine and spent half my life at the Millbrook Proving Ground, being barked at or told off by officialdom was a near-daily occurrence.

As Colin Goodwin recommends below, do watch the Autocar £250 banger race video on YouTube (tiny.cc/e2utsz); it will give you a very clear idea of just what lunacy you could get away with at Brunters.

Which was my most cherished moment there? Obviously it was road testing the McLaren F1 in 1994, the culmination of years of hard work and quite clearly the summit of my career as road test editor. But that story has been told here and elsewhere a thousand times. So I’m going to go for another because, despite indulging in all kinds of lunacy (including reaching what remains my highest speed to date of 217mph in a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport), I’ve only once been genuinely scared at Bruntingthorpe.

I was steaming down the runway, as you do, in a thing called the Lamborghini Diablo SE30, which was basically a very-limited-edition Diablo with lots of expensive carbonfibre bits that you really wouldn’t want to bend. There was a 30mph crosswind but, even at 180mph, the Lambo was impressively stable. Which is more than can be said for a traffic cone that suddenly got up from its position marking the side of the track, hovered briefly and then flung itself directly into the path of a rather expensive Italian supercar covering a mile every 20 seconds.

The scary bit was looking down and seeing my hands start to move the steering wheel in instinctive avoidance. I still don’t like to think what might have happened had I gone through with a three-miles-a-minute emergency lane-change manoeuvre. Happily I abandoned the plan and hit the cone head on, which I must confess didn’t do the car much good. In fact, it left little bits of carbonfibre all over the runway – but left me entirely unscathed.

There are so many people who are going to miss Bruntingthorpe, but probably none more than that happy band of slightly unhinged road testers from magazines and television shows across the country who have converged on the Leicestershire airfield to mess about in cars at speeds you would normally need an aircraft to achieve. Thank you, Brunters. It has been a blast.

More fond farewells

Matt Saunders: The Bruntingthorpe runway used to host an unmissable annual fixture for Autocar: the 0-100-0. And 2006 may have been the best year of all. The Bugatti Veyron did it in 9.9sec; Robbie Kerr turned up in his A1GP single-seater and went quicker still. He also took on a TVR Tuscan 2, a veteran road tester and a novice - me - as part of a 0-100-0 driving technique investigation; and suffice to say he battered me. However, my pedal-hopping reaction time just above 100mph was just a tad better, and that’s been enough to dine out on ever since.