F1 flashback: 1926 grands prix
As the British Grand Prix celebrates its centenary, Matt Bishop recounts another GP held 100 years ago, which failed to deliver much excitement, but featured an extraordinary array of characters
Meo Costantini, in car, is pictured having won the 1925 Targa Florio. He finished 16 laps down the following year in the French Grand Prix
The 2026 British Grand Prix is almost upon us, and I find myself looking forward to it rather more than usual, for the Formula 1 World Championship is about to return to Silverstone for what promises to be one of the most historically resonant F1 race weekends in recent memory. Why so, you may be wondering? Well, because the occasion will embrace celebrations marking the centenary of the very first British Grand Prix, staged at Brooklands on August 7, 1926.
Yes, yes, yes; don’t tell me; I know: 21st-century F1 bigwigs have an unfortunate tendency to stare through their windscreens without even glancing at their rear-view mirrors, yet from time to time a few of them are also capable of remembering that the optimal route ahead is sometimes selected most felicitously by analysis of the road already traversed. I am hoping that this coming weekend will be one of those occasions – but, even if my hopes are realised, what should we make of the 1926 British Grand Prix, now, 100 years on? And where should we start when it comes to answering that interesting but thorny question?
OK, here goes. One statistic pertaining to the race looks almost impossibly unimpressive when viewed through the prism of 2026, for only nine drivers (and nine riding mechanics) took part. Yet their nine cars represented the cutting edge of mid-1920s international motor sport, and those three Delages, three Talbots, one Bugatti, one Aston Martin, and one Halford Special were hurled by their intrepid pilots at a truly formidable task: 100 laps of Brooklands’ steeply banked 2.61-mile (4.21km) near-oval, which daunting assignment required a little more than four hours to complete.
Robert Benoist would finish the 1926 British GP in third
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Only three cars survived that marathon. Victory went to a Delage shared by Robert Sénéchal and Louis Wagner, whose combination of flamboyant wheelmanship and mechanical sympathy proved irresistible; second place fell to Malcolm Campbell in a Bugatti; third was another Delage, shared by Robert Benoist and André Dubonnet. The remaining six entries succumbed, as race cars so often did in those uncompromising years when reliability was as prized a virtue as pace.
Brooklands has always exerted a peculiar allure for people like me. It is simultaneously a historical monument, an archaeological site, and a living reminder that every modern circuit owes something to that extraordinary Surrey bowl where speed first became a national obsession in the UK. It is also a museum – and last Thursday evening, on June 25, in temperatures that seemed more Wadi Halfa than Weybridge, I enjoyed the pleasure and the privilege of attending the preview of the museum’s splendid new exhibition commemorating the centenary of the first British Grand Prix. It was a wonderfully warm evening in every sense of the word, for the sunshine lingered lazily across the banking as conversations drifted between old friends, motor sport historians, volunteers, and enthusiasts whose shared love of racing transcended genders and generations.
Britain’s Grand Prix Story exhibition includes this Bugatti Type 37, a version of which raced at Brooklands in the 1927 GP
Matt BIshop
I hope you will forgive me for mentioning that I was genuinely humbled to discover that one of the exhibition’s multimedia installations included an interview with yours truly, in my capacity as a founder ambassador of Racing Pride, the not-for-profit organisation dedicated to advancing and supporting LGBTQ+ inclusion throughout motor sport. Racing Pride has always sought to demonstrate that motor sport’s future will be strongest when everyone who wants to be a part of it feels welcome within it, regardless of who they are and whom they enjoy having sex with. To see that message woven naturally into an exhibition celebrating a century of British Grand Prix history was not only profoundly moving but also completely appropriate. After all, history should not merely chronicle where we have been; it should also direct us to where we should go, and Brooklands’ Britain’s Grand Prix Story exhibition succeeds admirably in doing exactly that. It celebrates engineering brilliance without descending into nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; it honours great drivers without pretending that they were flawless; and it reminds visitors that motor sport has never stood still, placing its evolution through the ages in a social context as well as a sporting one.
Malcolm Campbell finished second in the 1926 British Grand Prix in a Bugatti Type 39A. He returned to Brooklands a month later (pictured) with son Donald and a Type 36 for the BARC Autumn Meeting
As anyone who knows me will readily testify, I have an incurable affection for anniversaries. Some people collect stamps; others hoard vinyl; a few fill their cellars with fine wine. I seem to assemble anniversaries, and as a result I find it difficult to resist the urge to point out when they are being celebrated fractionally out of sync with the calendar. It is an occupational hazard for all devotees of motor sport history, and I plead guilty without hoping for mitigation. So, while Silverstone’s and indeed Brooklands’ centenary celebrations surrounding the 1926 British Grand Prix are welcome and justified, I cannot resist pointing out that, in terms of proximity of dates, there is another 1926 grand prix whose centenary coincides more precisely with the weekend on which the 2026 British Grand Prix will take place. Indeed, as you read these words on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, the 100th anniversary of that other grand prix has only just passed. I am referring to the 1926 French Grand Prix, which was run on June 27 of that year.
Now, that really was an extraordinary race, although ‘race’ perhaps flatters it somewhat. The circuit that hosted it was in the small town of Miramas, in Provence, in the south of France, and it was a joyless albeit perilous oval into which the organisers had inserted two temporary chicanes in an attempt to make it less dangerous. Initially, the entry list looked respectable, for 12 cars were nominated – three Bugattis, three Delages, three Talbots, and three SIMA-Violets – heralding the likelihood of a healthy competition between four distinguished car manufacturers. However, the reality proved less inspiring. One by one, entry after entry evaporated, until only the three Bugattis were left. As a result the 1926 French Grand Prix involved only three cars, all of them identical Bugatti Type 39As.
I hesitate to describe the starting formation as a grid. It was more accurately a row. Jules Goux, Meo Costantini, and Pierre de Vizcaya lined up side-by-side, ready to contest 100 laps of the 3.17-mile (5.10km) ovale. And did the race, when it finally got underway, compensate with quality for what it lacked in quantity? No, it did not. De Vizcaya retired before half-distance with a blown engine, by which time Goux had lapped Costantini 12 times. As the sun beat down on the unhelmeted heads of the two remaining protagonists, Costantini, knowing that victory was unattainable and second place was his no matter what, took to making a pitstop every other lap to cool his head by soaking his cloth skullcap in cold water. By the time Goux had reeled off the 100th and final lap, after four hours and 39 minutes, Costantini was 16 laps in arrears.
Jean Chassagne (No7), Ernest Friderich (No13), Pierre De Vizcaya (No18), Leonico Garnier (No21), and Meo Costantini (No22) at Lyons for the 1924 French Grand Prix
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None of the above should diminish Goux himself, because he was a driver of significant ability whose reputation deserves greater burnishing than history has generally afforded it. Thirteen years earlier, in 1913, for example, he had become the first non-American to win the Indianapolis 500, a Frenchman driving a Peugeot in one of the defining performances of the Brickyard’s formative decades. Not only was his victory margin over second-placed Spencer Wishart a gargantuan 13 minutes eight seconds – an Indy record that stands to this day – but Goux sustained his storming pace by refreshing himself with a hefty swig of vintage champagne during his every pitstop. That achievement alone should have guaranteed him a hallowed place in motor sport history – whereas his lonely win at Miramas says rather more about the parlous state of 1920s grand prix racing than it does about the calibre of the man twirling the winning Bugatti’s steering wheel.
Besides, by far the most fascinating aspects of the 1926 French Grand Prix lie not in the competition itself, which scarcely existed, but in the competitors. So, moving on from Goux, let’s take a look at Costantini, who had already lived a life that many Hollywood screenwriters would reject as implausibly adventurous. During the First World War he had served as a fighter pilot for the Squadriglia degli Assi, an elite section of the Italian air force, flying SPAD (Société Pour l’Aviation et ses Dérivés) biplanes with distinction and earning military decorations for his courage and success. Peacetime redirected his appetite for calculated risk towards motor sport, where he became one of Bugatti’s star turns. His victories in the Targa Florios of 1925 and 1926 have rightly been hailed as two of the most impressive conquests of that notoriously unforgiving Sicilian classic, whose rough mountain roads exposed a driver’s timidity every bit as ruthlessly as they punished a car’s frailty.
Costantini’s influence over Bugatti extended well beyond his driving career, for he eventually became its chef d’équipe, overseeing the racing operation with intelligence and authority before helping nurture the young Jean Bugatti into a position of responsibility and seniority within the company during the mid-1930s – but to no avail, for in August 1939 the Bugatti heir was killed at the tender age of just 30 while testing a Bugatti Type 57 Le Mans car on a public road near the village of Duppigheim in the north-east of France.
Goux was the first non-American to win the Indianapolis 500
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Finally, there was de Vizcaya, the least celebrated of the 1926 French Grand Prix trio, whose brief life is to my mind the most haunting to contemplate. A Spanish nobleman, throughout the early 1920s he fashioned a decent career racing Bugattis to a series of respectable placings. To be fair, he won the 1921 Gran Premio do Penya Rhin, a voiturette race run on the Circuito Villafranca del Panadés, in Tarragona, on Spain’s Costa Dorada, but I can find no record of any other major successes for him. The 1926 French Grand Prix was his last race.
Seven years later, one night in 1933, joy-riding through Paris’s Bois de Boulogne in an Alfa Romeo driven by his friend and fellow racer Carlo Felice Trossi, the unapologetically eccentric and immensely wealthy pipe-smoking Italian aristocrat who had worked with Enzo Ferrari in the formative years of the famous Scuderia and would eventually become one of the great man’s closest confidants, something very odd happened. Trossi’s dog became restless in the Alfa’s cockpit, so much so that eventually it began to try to leap out of the speeding car. Since Trossi was busy at the wheel, de Vizcaya attempted to restrain the miscreant mutt. In doing so he himself was thrown out, he hit his head on the asphalt, and he sustained fatal injuries. A man who had survived the considerable hazards of early grand prix racing ultimately lost his life in a vain attempt to save an anxious spaniel.
So by all means celebrate the centenary of Britain’s first grand prix with all the enthusiasm that it richly deserves. Certainly you must make time to wander through Brooklands’ magnificent new exhibition if you can. Undoubtedly you should spare a thought for those nine courageous men who 100 years ago accepted the challenge of driving 100 laps around that remarkable Home Counties oval, and for the three crews who alone endured to the finish after more than four gruelling hours. But please raise a glass, too, to Jules Goux, whose strangely solitary 1926 French Grand Prix victory reached its own centenary only days ago, and please also remember Meo Costantini and Pierre de Vizcaya, whose lives remind us that motor sport history is seldom as straightforward as the result sheets suggest.
