If you’ve got a kid who can name every driver on the grid but couldn’t tell you a single date from their history homework, Brooklands Museum might have just solved that problem for you. They’ve opened a new exhibition marking 100 years of British Grand Prix racing, and it’s worth a look if you’ve got a Formula 1 fan under your roof.
It’s called Britain’s Grand Prix Story, and it’s tucked inside the Jackson Shed which is a real 1930s racing workshop. This year is the 100th anniversary of Britain’s first ever Grand Prix, which took place at Brooklands in 1926. A hundred years later and we’ve gone from that to hybrid engines and DRS zones and the exhibition will take you through it all.
There are four sections. Where It All Began sets the scene for that first 1926 race. Innovation Through the Decades gets into engines, aerodynamics and safety, the sort of stuff that tends to grab kids who like taking things apart to see how they work.
Driven by People is about everyone who isn’t the driver, mechanics, marshals, engineers, which I think is actually a nice thing for kids to see, since most of them assume F1 is just one person in a car. And Into the Future closes things out with a mural made from a public competition where people were asked to design a Grand Prix car of the future.
But if I’m honest, the thing that’ll actually sell this to a ten year old is the F1 simulator underneath a racing car hanging from the ceiling. Kids don’t care about anniversaries. They care about getting in a simulator and pretending to be Verstappen for five minutes. That’s the bit they’ll talk about in the car on the way home.
It’s included in general admission, so there’s no extra charge to get in and see it. Book and learn more here.
