On a chilly February day in 1999, Top Gear’s Tiff Needell set a new record for lapping a British circuit. Behind the wheel of a McLaren F1, he averaged 195 mph with a peak speed just above 200 mph.
The circuit was the two-mile “bowl” at the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire, some 50 miles from London. First opened in 1970 by GM for its Bedford and Vauxhall brands, it has passed through several owners, including Lotus, in the 55 years since.
Most of the time, it’s a serious place where automakers go to put prototype vehicles through rigorous testing, not just at high speeds, but also on a variety of other courses, but there have been many, many occasions where mayhem at Millbrook was more typical. I know because I was there.
At risk of sounding a little “back in my day,” the car-testing business 25 years ago was, well, different than it is today. Cars got pushed to within an inch of their life, and sometimes beyond.
Although my first job at Auto Express magazine officially had me on news and features, occasionally I’d get the chance to accompany the road test team to ‘figure’ the new cars in for review. We’d strap cumbersome Correvit timing gear to the car, which used optical beams to accurately measure speed and distance, and then, on Millbrook’s mile-long straight, we’d try to match the manufacturers’ claimed acceleration times.
Our road test editor had some interesting ideas about how to extract the maximum performance from a motor vehicle. For example, revving an auto box-equipped BMW 850i to peak power in neutral and then slamming it into drive. In fairness, it worked. Once. After that, the transmission was toast.
I moved on to Top Gear magazine and, as we had a smaller team, I found myself bombing around the Bedfordshire tracks much more often. In fact, within my first couple of weeks, I was in the passenger seat of an Alpina-tuned BMW with the Correvit’s big processor/printer on my lap when, somewhere close to 150 mph, the engine let go spectacularly. Leaving chunks of metal in our wake, we somehow made it down from the outside lane of the high-speed oval and ground to a halt.
As was typical, we weren’t wearing helmets and simply drove the car as it was delivered without so much as a glimpse at tire pressures or temperatures. That’s probably why the fastest man around Millbrook, Tiff Needell, also blistered a Porsche 928’s rubber after a vMax run.
The angle of the banking permits a “hands-off” speed of 100 mph. In other words, at exactly that speed, it is equivalent to a straight line. You can remove your hands from the wheel and it will hold station. It’s a trick we always demonstrated to terrified first-time visitors, while two colleagues on another title went even further, setting the cruise control on a Bentley and then both clambering into the back seat to be chauffeured—they were fortunate to emerge from that one unscathed.
Go beyond 100 mph and you had to start steering, though, and the faster you went, the more angle was needed. The closer you could get to the rusty-looking barriers, the less input was required. Even so, at about 150 mph, you needed to put in a decent amount of steering lock—and just look at how much Tiff had to steer to achieve 200 mph:
We’d do lap after lap of this, trying to reach a top speed that matched the carmakers’ claims. It was often sketchy, but in slower cars, monotony would set in—so much so that one legend of the car magazine world actually dozed off at the wheel.
With the business of figuring completed—and if said car was still functioning—we’d always head to the Hill Route. This gnarly, winding track simulates an Alpine pass, with off-camber corners, whoops, and crests. On one of these, the goal in any car was to get all four wheels off the ground. Easy in something light like a Lotus, but in a big sedan, the speed required was a little silly considering the sharp left-hander that followed.
The Hill Route has been used as a rally stage and featured on film many times, most notably in Casino Royale, where 007’s famous Aston Martin multiple rollover was shot. Incidentally, that was another record, this time for consecutive barrel rolls by a car on film.
Generally speaking, we didn’t bother much with the tighter, narrower city course that had assorted potholes dotted throughout its length. Tiff used to love it, though, and I’ll never forget the sight of him sliding sideways in a police car with two bobbies on board. I can’t quite remember why this happened, but the image is imprinted on my brain.
Somehow, despite the opportunity to drive flat out at the track, it was often the journey on the backroads to Millbrook that was even more exhilarating. Late for an early rendezvous, road testers would inevitably press on rather more than was wise. One morning, two drivers from a rival magazine found themselves in the same field just yards from the gate.
I recently returned to Millbrook for the first time in decades for the U.K.’s annual Society of Motor Manufacturers’ and Traders (SMMT) test day. It’s like speed dating with cars—a chance for a quick spin in a wide variety of vehicles.
Driving top-down at 100 mph in a Mercedes-AMG CLE 53, all the memories of Millbrook misbehavior came flooding back. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to launch it over the Hill Route’s yump.
Now representing an insurance company, though, I thought better of it.
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