Donington Park Track Map Poster

Before the war, the lap at Donington Park squeezed under one narrow arch of a garden bridge built in 1834, almost in single file, and threaded a farmyard through a gate beside the farmhouse. The bridge still stands, cut short at the edge of today’s track, and the circuit around it runs 4.020 km (2.50 miles) clockwise through twelve turns in Leicestershire parkland.

It began in 1931, when a former motorcycle racer paid his entrance fee to the park, wandered its lanes and talked the owner into a race. Five weeks later, a dirt course joining the estate roads drew 20,000 paying spectators, and by 1933 it was paved: the first permanent park circuit in England. In 1937 the German cars came, and on Starkey’s Straight they reached 274 km/h (170 mph). One reporter wrote that they roared like hungry lions.

War turned the park into a military vehicle depot, and by 1971 cows were grazing where those cars had raced. That year a builder who, as a boy, had cycled over to watch the races of 1937 and 1938 bought the old circuit and the parkland around it, and in 1977 the racing came back, its new line skirting the old bridge. The Craner Curves are its signature: a roller-coaster plunge downhill where the road crests at the apex and drops away just as the weight shifts, and the car goes light.

The poster numbers all twelve turns and letters in corners and straights, from Redgate and the Craner Curves to Starkey’s Bridge and the Melbourne Hairpin, with the shorter National link in a muted line. Heritage, the vintage clubhouse edition, suits a circuit that was already racing through a country park before the war. Under one of those arches, once, every car passed in single file.