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The idea for the very first Racing Car Show, held in 1960 belonged to Ian Smith, who at that time was the treasurer of the British Racing and Sports Car Club.
As the man in charge of the purse strings, he needed to find a new source of income for the Club and he hit upon the idea of a racing equivalent of the Motor Show. He had visited Earls Court in 1958 and been astonished to find the the World Championship winning |
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Vanwall was not represented and he realised that he had found the answer to the BRSCC's financial problems. The Club's committee agreed, so Smith set about the immense task of organising this venture from scratch with the help of a sub committee comprising Les Leston, Derek Newton and Nick Syrett.
It is a measure of the success of the first organising committee that these four men continued to be responsible for the planning of the Racing Car Show throughout the 1960s, into the period when the |
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BRSCC and the SMMT became joint organisers.
That first show was a great success. Held at the Old Horticultural Halls in Westminster, it was opened on January 2, 1960 by Earl Howe, and over the following seven days attracted 40,000 people.
As contemporary racing enthusiasts appreciated, here was an exhibition where the emphasis was on current racing machinery rather than famous cars of the past. Among the Grand Prix cars on display was Jack Brabham's World |
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Championship winning Cooper and the BRM P25 which Jo Bonnier took to vistory in the Dutch GP at Zandvoort that year. Pride of place among the sports cars on show belonged to the Aston Martin DBR1 which had won Le Mans, the Nurburgring 1000Kms and the Tourist Trophy.
Apart from the glamorous exhibits, there were plenty of new cars from manufacturers anxious to do business at the show. Lotus, for example, used the first show to launch their new rear-engined Formula Junior (on the Autosport stand), while other |
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manufacturers with new cars for this category included Cooper, Elva and Lola. All the Formula Junior marques, therefore, were gathered under one roof, giving the prospective competitor a unique chance to compare the cars available to him. |
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