The Brooklands Podcast

Richard Noble came to Brooklands on the 23rd January to talk about his World Speed Records. In part one he recounts his land speed record challenges. What a story!

When Eric Fernihough lost control of his motorcycle at over 170mph, he was the last British rider to have been the ‘world’s fastest’ on two wheels. An orphan, an adopted son, a public schoolboy, a Cambridge graduate, an engineer, a noted tuner, a European motorcycle champion, a multiple Brooklands race winner, ‘Ferni’ was a motorcycling household name in the nineteen thirties. On a new road in far-away Hungary, he rode to his death on 23 April 1938. His life story, which this book tells, spanned more than thirty year’s of furious competition for the world’s absolute motorcycle speed record before World War 2.

First in 1900 was a Frenchman on an American motorcycle. French motorcycles took the lead in 1902 until an American boardtrack rider rode his best ever at England’s Brooklands Motor Course in 1911. An English rider and machine promptly took the title back before the Americans recovered it. With the world at war, in 1916 an Australian was the fastest on a remote dirt road near Adelaide.

After a short period of American supremacy on the sands of America’s Daytona Beach, Brooklands was the setting for more world’s record efforts before the long, straight roads of France became the new battleground. British riders and motorcycles were unbeatable until German technical ingenuity, and a BMW rider Ernst Henne, became dominant during the lean years of the Great Depression.

Eric Fernihough set out to challenge this German hegemony. With supercharged big-twin JAP engines in Brough Superior motorcycles, he drove to the south of Budapest and set the absolute world’s motorcycle speed record there at 169.79mph in April 1937. Gilera-mounted Piero Taruffi just squeezed past him before Henne took the title again at 173.68mph. Back in Hungary, Fernihough was aiming for over 175mph when he crashed and was killed.

Drawing on Fernihough’s personal papers and photographs at Brooklands Museum, the Mutschler collection in Germany, Henne’s private albums at the BMW archives and many other sources, this book has hundreds of never-before-published photographs and drawings. It is the first detailed history of the world’s absolute motorcycle speed record and the first biography of a great motorcycle rider.

Most of the images are reproduced from 'Speed Monarch: the short life of Eric Fernihough and the world's motorcycle speed record' by Terry Wright which is published by Loose Fillings Publishing and can be ordered online at www.loosefillings.com or leading motoring booksellers. Credit to Katy Coubrough for the excellent image production as seen in the book.

Doug Nye is one of the world’s foremost motorsport journalists and authors. In 2023 he celebrated his 60th year as a racing journalist, having joined Motor Racing magazine in 1963. He went on to work for Motoring News and Motor Sport before going freelance. He remains a regular contributor to many racing and classic car publications in the UK and worldwide.

He is the multiple award-winning author of more than 70 books covering motor sporting history. His books include works on Lotus, Cooper, BRM, Ferrari and McLaren, and biographies of pre-war British ace Dick Seaman, Juan Manuel Fangio, Sir Stirling Moss, Sir Jack Brabham, Phil Hill and Jim Clark.

Doug is consultant historian to Goodwood Motorsport, and is one of the co-founders of the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Goodwood Revival Meeting.

In much demand throughout the world for his unrivalled motorsport knowledge, we look welcome Doug to Brooklands for a most insightful and entertaining evening.

Max Chilton talks with Harry Sherrard about his fascinating and varied career in Motorsport.

After starting his career in karts aged 10, Max Chilton progressed up the racing ladder through Formula 3 and GP2, reaching Formula One in 2013 with the Marussia team. He achieved the distinction of being the only driver to finish every race of his rookie season. A further season in Formula One followed, then Max moved stateside to drive for Chip Ganassi Racing in the IndyCar series. In the 2017 Indianapolis 500, Max dominated the latter part of the race, leading 47 of the last 72 laps, ultimately finishing fourth. Further IndyCar seasons followed, before a switch to the World Endurance Championship, including the Le Mans 24 Hours.

In June 2022, with a performance that anyone who witnessed it will never forget, Max took the electric McMurtry active-downforce car up the Goodwood hillclimb in 39.08 seconds, to set an astonishing new Festival of Speed shoot out record.

From bamboo biplanes to supersonic airliners and the pioneer designers who created them

A History of Aviation at Brooklands in 100 Objects. The author Nigel Spooner writes;

The book is a history of aviation at Brooklands in 100 objects that are arranged into

seven episodes, each of which covers a particular era of that history. Choosing what to include and

what to leave out has been a difficult task – there can be no such thing as a perfect list! The objects

include aircraft, engines, places and many other elements that played a role in the transformation

of Brooklands from a marshy water meadow to one of Europe’s largest aircraft factories. The intent

with each one is not to indulge in too many technical details but rather to explore the stories and

people behind them. I have also included relatively brief biographies on each of the six featured

designers that are intended to show their personal contributions to the Brooklands history.

Although Derek never won in Formula 1, due to ill fortune and so often being in the wrong car at the wrong time, he did achieve the results he deserved in sports car racing, winning the Le Mans 24 Hours and the World Championship in 1992, plus finishing series runner-up with Jaguar in 1986 and 1991. In the twilight of his racing career, that world title was a fitting companion to the one he had earned as a short-track oval racer nearly 20 years earlier.

Derek Warwick has been a popular and highly respected figure in motor racing for nearly 50 years, known for his tough and determined personality as well as his talent and bravery behind the wheel. He was always a fan favourite for his humility and straightforwardness, which earned him respect and admiration from the motorsports world.

Now, with characteristic honesty and humour, his forthcoming book will tell his inspiring story in a memoir that holds nothing back, published by EVRO.

Neil Laughton is a former Royal Marine Commando, helicopter pilot and Special Forces Officer who went on to become one of the world's greatest adventurers and a multiple Guinness World Record breaker.

He has organised and led more than 50 expeditions on seven continents – by land, sea and air. His amazing adventures include piloting the world’s first road legal flying car on a 10,000 km journey from London to Timbuktu; crossing the Sahara desert on KTM motorcycles; a 1,000 km journey across the spine of the Himalayas on Royal Enfields; circumnavigating the UK & Ireland on a jet ski; summiting Mt Everest with Bear Grylls, and skiing to both the north and south poles.

He organised and led Flying for Heroes, a 1,000 km flying journey in Paratrikes from Mt Kilimanjaro (Tanzania) to Mt Kenya with wounded soldiers from the Help 4 Heros charity, and he has recently taken part in a humanitarian mission to Ukraine.

Neil’s book ‘Adventureholic – Extraordinary journeys on seven continents by land, sea and air’ was published in 2023 and became an Amazon No. 1 bestseller.

Our speaker is author and journalist Rachel Harris-Gardiner. Her award winning book, Speed Queens, on which her talk is based, is a history of women in motorsport, from the first known motorised race for women in 1897 to the modern era, and covering both circuit racing and rallying.

Some of the best-known female competitors such as Brooklands’ own Kay Petre and Gwenda Stewart, rally stars Rosemary Smith, Pat Moss and Michele Mouton and the only female Formula 1 points scorer Lella Lombardi are covered, but Speed Queens is not just concerned with big names and historic “firsts”. For every woman to be the first to do something on wheels, there were usually several others striving for success.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, international relations across the globe were dominated by the Cold War. From 1949 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries created the best-equipped armed forces that the world had ever seen, and which faced each other directly across the Iron Curtain in Europe. Our speaker is Michael Napier, an ex-RAF Tornado pilot turned author, who saw frontline service during the Cold War as well as combat experience over Iraq. Michael examines the airpower of the major powers at both strategic and tactical level throughout the 40 years of the Cold War, including the aircraft types, the units that operated them in the roles in which they were deployed.

The exploits of the SAS in North Africa in the early years of the Second World War are well known; attacks behind enemy lines, destruction of hundreds of German aircraft on the ground and generally creating mayhem for the Afrika Korps. But little of this would have been possible without the Long Range Desert Group. Experts in desert navigation, the LRDG was formed to carry out deep penetration, covert reconnaissance patrols and intelligence missions behind Axis lines. As the commando tactics of the SAS developed, a reliable mode of transport to and from targets, often across hundreds of miles of desert, was provided by the LRDG to the SAS, using their ubiquitous 30 cwt Chevrolet trucks.

Our speaker is Richard Pinches, whose father, Peter Pinches, served in North Africa with the 7th Armoured Division. Richard is a Second World War re-enactor and historian, specialising in the North African campaign and the LRDG. His talk covers the vital but often overlooked role of this uniquely skilled and capable unit of the Desert Rats.