Motor Sport and the Sports Car

Abstract

In the summer of 1905 the Midland Automobile Club, that influential Birmingham body which included amongst its members George Lanchester, Percy Martin, Ernest Instone and George Heath, felt that at last it had solved one of its problems. For some time it had been trying to find a hill track which combined a steep gradient with a satisfactory number of sharp bends, and now it seemed to have found one on the land of an actual club member, at Court House Farm, Shelsley Walsh, in the heart of the Worcestershire hop country. As many as thirty-eight cars were entered in the first meeting on 12 August 1905,¹ but as the event was repeated over subsequent years and other clubs began to hear of it entries came from a widening area. Other hill climbs, such as that of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, were also starting, and a whole pattern of hill climbs, rallies, reliability trials and speed tests was being evolved, to form an integral part of what we call motor sport, alongside the spectacular road and track races of which we have already said something and will in due course say more.