Motor Racing: Hooked by the sound of thunder

Tom on the podium with Ayrton Senna after his sensational European Grand Prix victory at Donington Park in 1993

EARLIER this year, Tom Wheatcroft was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Derby. As he says, himself, in his recently published autobiography Thunder in the Park – “not bad for someone who only went to school for 18 months and left at 13½”.

Despite his brief education and starting his working life as a 12/6d a week plasterer, the lad from Leicester went on to become a multi-millionaire, owning and running one of the biggest private construction companies in the Midlands.

But it’s not for that remarkable achievement that he will be remembered – but for the lifelong passion for motorsport which drove him to invest part of his fortune in restoring the derelict pre-war racing circuit at Donington Park.

Tom first visited Donington as a teenager in 1935 when the fledgling circuit was just two miles and 971 yards, cycling the 60-mile round trip from his home.

“From the moment I arrived there and found myself hanging over the chestnut paling fences, I became totally hooked. The cars, the bikes, the sounds, the smells, the huge crowds, the bookies calling the odds, the thrills and spills of the races themselves – I found the whole atmosphere totally intoxicating. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.”

Tom’s abiding memory from those pre-war days is “the distinctive smell of the Castrol R racing oil that used to hang in the woods. If I close my eyes, I can smell it now and it instantly takes me back.

“I can still picture the groups of people in trilby hats and flat caps picnicking under the trees in the intervals between races. And the car parks full of MG Midgets, Austin 7s, Wolseley Hornets...”

Thirty-six years later, Tom was to buy the circuit, settling the price with owner Major John Gillies Shields by tossing a two shilling coin. Despite many ups and downs and arguments with planners, he restored and improved the circuit, finally fulfilling his dream when, in 1993, Donington staged the European Grand Prix of the Formula 1 World Championship – won by the late Ayrton Senna.

It was Tom’s proudest moment.

“As I made my way rather shakily up the steps of the podium to present him (Senna) with his trophy, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I had at last achieved my ambition to hold a Grand Prix at Donington and it had been won in sensational style by the man who will go down in history as one of the greatest and most universally revered drivers of them all.”

Tom’s passion for motor-racing led him, early on, to start collecting Grand Prix cars. In 1973, he opened his spectacular Donington Grand Prix Collection, which houses 130 cars, including one smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain in a coal barge during the Cold War.

Over the years, his involvement in the sport, has led Tom to form close friendships with racing legends across the years from Juan-Manual Fangio and Ayrton Senna to Jack Brabham, James Hunt and Sir Jackie Stewart.

At 83 and recently remarried, Tom is still at the helm, going to the office most days. He has plans to rebuild the museum complex and still dreams of bringing the Grand Prix back to Donington once more.

But his greatest hope is that his Grand Prix Collection will continue to be enjoyed by future generations and become “a lasting monument to the history of motorsport in this country. And, in particular, to those great pioneering days of British Grand Prix racing when, for the first time, Donington Park echoed to the sound of thunder”.

Thunder in the Park by Tom Wheatcroft is available at most bookshops , priced £20.

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This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.