1957 International Trophy

Silverstone, September 14th

Under normal circumstances the Daily Express sponsored meeting at Silverstone is held in May, but this year the petrol rationing frightened the organisers into postponing their race meeting until a suitable date could be found. This turned out to be the day scheduled for the R.A.C. Tourist Trophy, which seems fated not to happen regularly, and in consequence the International Trophy meeting took place just six days after the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. At the best of times this Silverstone meeting never has a very terrific Formula 1 entry, invariably clashing with the Naples Grand Prix, so that the Italian teams usually divide their forces, but this year, being sandwiched between the races at Monza and Modena, neither of the Italian Formula 1 teams was interested in attending. In addition Vandervell felt that his team had worked hard enough winning Pescara and Monza and decided to give the Silverstone meeting a miss, especially as it did not count for anything very much Internationally. Added to this was the fact that Formula II cars were to run concurrently with the Formula 1 cars, and while this is all right on a long circuit like Nurburgring, round the Silverstone airfield it was cramping things a bit. All that was left was B.R.M. as they gave Monza a miss, so had plenty of time to prepare for Silverstone, and they did an excellent job, entering three cars driven by Behra, Schell and Flockhart.

As always happens at this meeting there are numerous short sprint-type races, with the Formula 1 event for the International Trophy as the main event of the day. This year the entry was divided into two separate heats, everyone finishing in his heat going into the Final, with the starting grid for the Final being decided on heat speeds. The starting grids for the heats were established on practice times, so that what it boiled down to was two lots of extra practice in the form of the heats and the race proper over 35 laps or 105 miles, each heat being only 15 laps.