Motor Sport Brooklands Trophy Award

Premier VSCC contest winner enjoys the fruits of a successful season of bare-bones racing

One of my appointments at the Race Retro exhibition (see also p22) was to watch the VSCC Motor Sport Brooklands Memorial Trophy being presented on the show stage. This award goes back to 1950 and Bill Boddy’s desire to perpetuate the memory of his beloved Brooklands which never re-opened after the war. Bill was a great supporter of the new Goodwood circuit which he saw as inheriting the mantle of the defunct Track, so with the money from the Brooklands Memorial Fund he had set up he commissioned a trophy to be contested by “drivers in Brooklands-style races” at Goodwood.

After the Sussex circuit closed in 1966 the VSCC took over running the trophy highly appropriate as the club boasted many of the very cars which had in theft time tackled the Byfleet Banking.

Today the trophy is awarded for cars of the right sort to have run at Brooklands, according to points garnered at the VSCC’s race meetings, and there are few cars ‘righter’ than a GN. That’s what Dougal Cawley drove to lift the 2011 trophy, which, after a few words by the VSCC’s Mike Stripe, Nigel Roebuck presented to him at the show. Very fitting, as Nigel recalled seeing the same elaborate silver cup going to Innes Ireland, later to become a friend of his. Dougal, who runs vintage tyre supplier Longstone Tyres, won seven races in his skimpy Ford-powered GN special, driving it to several events. Runner-up Riley man David Pryke also stepped up to collect his tankard, though third-placed Stephen Shoosmith couldn’t make it to Stoneleigh.

Very neatly, Motor Sport’s show stand featured a car which had lifted the trophy in earlier days — Tim Ely’s Riley Ulster Imp which brought Mike Hawthorn the award in 1951. Perhaps WB was looking down and recalling that day too.