The time will come when people will look back and marvel that a place like Bruntingthorpe ever existed. Or the Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground, to give it its official name. But it was never that to us. It was, remains and always will simply be Brunters.
And now that it has changed hands and seems likely never to be used for car testing again, it already seems faintly improbable that we got to use it at all. For this in our risk-averse, cotton-wool-wrapped 21st century was a place where you could be doing 200mph within five minutes of turning off the main road onto the facility.
Indeed, I remember doing exactly that with Peter Boutwood of Noble Automotive about 10 years ago in the then new M600. We turned up, we waved cheerily at the bloke on the gate, I fired it down a two-mile runway built to accommodate Cold War nuclear bombers, hit 200mph, completed the lap and left.
We were on site for eight minutes. More recently (as in last year), we gathered together a McLaren F1, P1 and McLaren Senna for one of the most special days any of those in attendance will enjoy in their working lives. Three cars worth a total of £30 million, Bruntingthorpe at our disposal and no rules of any kind. It was heaven on earth in automotive form.
And that was what we loved most about Brunters: not so much the fact that there was nowhere else in Britain you could go faster, but the lack of apparent rules. Opportunities to have accidents of unfeasible proportions were almost everywhere.
Lose control and you might wipe yourself out against a Lockheed Tristar, a Handley Page Victor or a Boeing 747. You could be chuntering down the straight at three miles a minute and find a motorcycle weaving around in front of you at one-fifth of your speed or, just occasionally, travelling in the other direction. It felt like the Wild West.
Yet mostly we stayed safe. We would usually go and have a chat with whoever else was using the facility, figure out a mutually satisfactory plan that resulted in not wiping each other out and then just get on with it. Which meant that, within the bounds of common sense, there wasn’t much we couldn’t do.
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The joy is being drained away
To what end exactly? Madness.
At least Bruntingthorpe has a
At least Bruntingthorpe has a future other than a housing estate.
Present plans include investing £millions toward CAV (Connected Autonomous Vehicles) research, which includes building test facilities for various types of road.
So, even if Bruntingthorpe is no longer heaven for keen drivers, AI robots will have somewhere to practise.
true
Forestry Commission are trying to destroy my sport at moment, Enduro, and snoflakes were trying to close down Mallory last year. Only a matter of time before this whole country is a building site
xxxx wrote:
We have friends who lived Kirkby Mallory, their neighbours we very vocal in their complaints about noise from the circuit some weekends, yet they moved to the village knowing it was there! Done a fare few hundred laps of it, both on a bike and motorbike, always gave it a bit when passing their house on the way out.