I never got to meet John Webb. More’s the pity because I didn’t get the chance to say thank you. And there’s a lot I have to thank him for. But for Webb and all that he did at Brands Hatch and beyond, I probably wouldn’t be sitting at my desk right now writing about motor racing.
Brands, thanks to its proximity to my home through my childhood and adolescence, played a key role in firing my passion for the sport that became my living. (Close enough, I have always insisted, for me to hear the bark of a Cosworth DFV when Formula 1 cars were on track if the wind was in the right direction.) I was barely in my teens when I was allowed to go up to Brands unaccompanied. Those days watching everything with four wheels — and on one occasion two — that visited what will always remain for me the greatest circuit in the world are so important in my life story.
The late Webb, who was at the helm of Brands and its sister circuits from 1966 until 1989, created a vibrant home for all forms and levels of racing. I saw my first grand prix there in 1978 and, probably crucially as it turned out, my first international sportscar race, the 1000Km[s] in 1981. But just as important were my trips to clubbie meetings. Had I lived near any other circuit in the UK I don’t believe I would have got the same exposure to such a diverse range of motorsport.
I look back on that period of my life with such joy. Just think about what I got to see over those years in the late 1970s and the first half of the ‘80s before I went off to university. Formula 1 cars on track multiple times a year, for a start, at least for a few of those years.
Webb, as long time Brands commentator Brian Jones once put it to me, believed that the race-going public liked to feel the earth rumble beneath them. That explains why he brought Formula 5000 to the UK and then created the British Formula 1 Championship — universally known as Aurora after the slot-car maker that sponsored it. Ditto Thundersports — a favourite of mine just for the sheer diversity of machinery — and Thundersaloons, a series for which I was something called media co-ordinator during a brief stint on the press office staff at Brands.
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Webb, the arch-promoter — because he was always a PR man at heart — knew that big, hairy racing cars brought paying spectators through the door. Which is why he still believed in the concept of non-championship F1 races long after they had fallen by the wayside elsewhere. And perhaps more pertinently why he could repeatedly persuade F1 ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone to supply him with a grid of cars.
Source: Autosport