The importance of endurance racing's belated return to Britain

Not much racing for me at this time of year. We’re in the middle of the World Endurance Championship’s summer break, but my eye isn’t just on its resumption at Austin early next month. There’s another date in September, circled and underlined in my diary, to which I’m looking forward. The reason? It’s a chance for me to once again witness international endurance racing on home ground.

The European Le Mans Series is returning to Britain on 14 September. More pertinently, the fifth round of WEC co-organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest’s ‘second’ series marks a comeback to the United Kingdom of what I’m going to call sportscar racing proper. And by 'proper' I’m talking long distance. Think about it, this decade there’s been no WEC, no ELMS, no GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup in a country so central to motorsport now and historically - that’s motorsport in general and with regard to sportscars.

That’s a travesty given that Silverstone hosted all those series each year for much of the 2010s. I say that as someone who grew up going to Brands Hatch, just a short trip up the road for me as a kid, in the 1980s to watch the local WEC enduro and unsuccessfully pestering his father to be taken further afield to the Silverstone round as well.

That’s right. The UK had two World Series Sportscar rounds through the 1980s. Well almost. In 1983, the Brands fixture counted towards the short-lived European Endurance Championship only, though John Fitzpatrick Racing’s famous Porsche privateer victory still came ahead of a couple of factory Rothmans cars and a pair of Martini-liveried Lancia LC2s. The casual fan probably wouldn’t have noticed the absence of world status.

Even as a fresh-faced reporter in my first year on the sportscar trail in 1990, I got to write about two rounds, Silverstone and then Donington Park, of what had become the World Sports-Prototype Championship. Since my maiden sportscar enduro, the Brands Hatch 1000Km in 1981, I’ve spectated at and then reported on multiple international endurance series in the UK. And the original version of the WEC hasn’t been the only one that changed its name along the way.

We shouldn’t forget about the BPR Global Endurance GT Series - another championship to visit us twice a year in both 1995 and ’96 — that begat first the FIA GT Championship and any number of series since, right up today’s GTWCE. Nor the International Sports Racing Series that eventually became the FIA Sportscar Championship and fed into the creation of the Le Mans Endurance Series. That makes it a forerunner of sorts of both today’s WEC and the ELMS.

The inaugural ISRS race was held at Donington in July 1997, I should point out. And fittingly so. Britain loves sportscar racing and sportscar racing loves Britain. That’s how it always seemed through my life on the spectator banking and then in the paddock.

Endurance racing will return to Silverstone this year

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

What I considered the natural order of things came to a juddering halt with COVID. It spelt the end of Britain’s run of international enduros that stretched back unbroken to 1968, save for the two years between the death of the old world sportscar championship at the end of 1992 and the GT revival really getting going in ’95.

Just in case you were wondering, I’m counting rounds of the European GT Championship and European 2-Litre Sportscar Championship (kind of the equivalent of the ELMS in its day) in that run. They visited Thruxton and Brands in, respectively, 1973 and ’75, two years in which Britain didn’t have a world series event. Okay, they were one-driver races (two 40-lappers of the grand prix circuit in the case of the latter) so perhaps not strictly enduros. But I’m trying to illustrate a point here: the strong connection between my country and the branch of our sport that has been my life.

The Silverstone 6 Hours WEC fixture, fought out for the RAC Tourist Trophy no less, that should have kicked off the 2020/21 campaign was cancelled along with the ELMS support race courtesy of COVID. The pandemic also did for the Endurance Cup and Sprint Cup rounds, scheduled for Silverstone and Brands, of what had just become the GTWCE in ’20.

Of course, the ELMS isn’t the WEC, the championship we all want to see come back. Silverstone has made no secret that it is talking to the ACO about a return with series bosses and vice versa. Welcoming the ELMS should be regarded as an important step in that direction.

The Sprint Cup quickly returned, and as early as late summer 2021. We should take our hats off to series boss Stephane Ratel and Jonathan Palmer of circuit owner Motor Sport Vision for making that happen so soon - and continue to happen. Brands is now firmly established on the calendar as the season-opener.

That event has been my one fix of big-time sportscar racing in my backyard over recent years. I call it sportscar racing as opposed to endurance racing, which is my true passion and I’m sure that of many a British aficionado too.

Of course, the ELMS isn’t the WEC, the championship we all want to see come back. Silverstone has made no secret that it is talking to the ACO about a return with series bosses and vice versa. Welcoming the ELMS should be regarded as an important step in that direction.

Both sides have highlighted the appetite of the British fan for long-distance racing. We know that from the 50,000-odd pilgrims who make the trek to the Le Mans 24 Hours each June.

The only 'endurance' action at Silverstone in recent years has been Aston Martin's testing of the Valkyrie hypercar

Photo by: Nick Dungan Photography

Ticket sales, I’m told, are going well for what we should correctly call the Goodyear 4 Hours of Silverstone and the circuit is confident of a crowd befitting this comeback weekend. We all want to feel a little bit of the atmosphere of Le Mans whether we’re stuck lap-charting in the press room or watching out on the spectator zones. (I hope to do a bit of both.)

It’s important that Silverstone is well attended. We Brits need to prove our passion for endurance. Packed grandstands will make bringing the WEC back a no-brainer for the ACO. So this is, if you like, a call to arms.

You want to be able to say “I was there” when top-level long-distance racing ended its hiatus from Britain with the ELMS this year. And then you’ll be able to also say when the WEC comes back to Dear Old Blightly, in 2027 or whenever, “I did my bit”.

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