Trophy marks our 90th

Motor Sport race to headline Donington Festival | By Paul Lawrence

A special event for pre-war sports cars at the high-profile Donington Historic Festival (May 3-5) will celebrate the 90th year of Motor Sport magazine, with a grid full of cars from the 1920s and ’30s competing in a pair of half-hour pit-stop races.

Running on Sunday and Monday of the three-day festival, The Motor Sport 90th Anniversary Trophy will mark the creation of the magazine – as the Brooklands Gazette – in the summer of 1924. Its title changed a year later.

A field of cars from Bentley, Frazer Nash, BMW, Vauxhall, Riley, MG and many others will be a highlight of what promises to be one of the best historic racing festivals of the 2014 season.

Event promoter Duncan Wiltshire said: “We plan to run a double-header and are very keen to give this event maximum exposure. It is the race that links the history of Donington Park to the event and to be able to celebrate the 90th birthday of Motor Sport is perfect. We’ll have cars on the grid from the year that the magazine was founded, and we’ll make a big paddock feature of the cars between races.”

The magazine’s editor Damien Smith said: “It’s entirely fitting that we should celebrate this notable anniversary with a race, at one of Britain’s oldest circuits, for sporting cars dating back to our first year of publication. Founder editor Bill Boddy would surely have approved.”