Heaven was a place on earth: At Bruntingthorpe, you could do pretty much anything on wheels. Andrew Frankel pens its eulogy

摘要

The time will come when people will look back and marvel that a place like Bruntingthorpe ever existed. Or the Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground, to give it its official name. But it was never that to us. It was, remains and always will simply be Brunters. And now that it has changed hands and seems likely never to be used for car testing again, it already seems faintly improbable that we got to use it at all. For this in our risk-averse, cotton-wool-wrapped 21st century was a place where you could be doing 200mph within five minutes of turning off the main road onto the facility.