Don't bank on it

Another bit of the Byfleet banking at Brooklands is being demolished. When I went there during the war and saw that I could drive in from that side of the track, where the banking had been destroyed to provide this new entrance, I realised that the days of Brooklands as a racetrack were over. Later in the war another great chunk of the banking was demolished so that Vickers aeroplanes would have a safer take-off from the new runway, which had been laid across the former grass aerodrome. Now comes this new entrance in Oyster Lane, to the Industrial Park, roughly at the spot where Chassagne’s Talbot-Darracq went over the top during the 1922 200 Mile race.

Apparently, the preservation orders do not cover this banking. It is said that, in return, the contractors will fill-in one or other of those former ghastly gaps in the historic banking. Rather as Gallaher, after they had chopped-up a length of the members’ banking to make space for a car park, compensated by filling-in a big hole left by a wartime hangar and relaying the banking at that point. Shall we soon have quite a nice unbroken run of Byfleet banking to admire once again?

I shall believe it when I see it…