http://www.santapod.co.uk/50th.phpSanta Pod Raceway Golden Anniversary in 2016
In 2016, Santa Pod Raceway celebrates its 50th birthday. On Easter Monday 1966, Europe’s first permanent dragstrip opened its gates for business, a fact which still surprises some who imagine drag racing to be a recent fad.
50th Anniversary
Drag racing arrived in Britain in the early 1960s. American all-star teams toured in 1964 and 1965, racing on airfield sites around the country, including the nearby Northamptonshire US Air Force base at Chelveston. Inspired by their success, a group of businessman-enthusiasts decided the sport needed a permanent British home and settled on a redundant wartime bomber base in a northern corner of Bedfordshire. Airfield sites and their perimeter roads provided locations for several postwar racetracks, notably Silverstone. The difference was that this new track would occupy the main runway.
The founders could have given the venue a prosaic name. Instead, they chose to link drag racing’s Southern California heartland – Santa Ana aerodrome was the site of the first commercial drag race in 1950 – with the Beds-Northants borderland and the village which gave the airfield its identity, Podington. Hence, Santa Pod – for all its compound eccentricity, a name that would become a landmark in British motorsport and known around the world.
Santa Pod nowadays is a wide-ranging entertainment venue with a dragstrip at its heart, offering a diverse weekly programme of events running from February to November. Its founders would not recognise it. Even the layout has changed. For the first two seasons, the track began where the finish line now stands; today’s 300mph speeds would not have been possible with the shorter ‘shutdown’ area. The modern premises – the vast, paved paddock which can accommodate more than 300 international racing teams and their transporters, as well as hosting its own motoring and entertainment events; the Live Action Arena; the hospitality facilities; the medical centre; the high-tech, millisecond-precise timing system; the stringent safety features – all these and more would have been unimaginable in those earliest years.
The 50th Anniversary calendar for 2016 has been announced. Dates for the season’s principal events are:
Festival Of Power - 25 to 27 March 2016
FIA/FIM Main Event – European Drag Racing - 27 to 30 May 2016
Dragstalgia - 15 to 17 July 2016
FIA/FIM European Finals - 8 to 11 September 2016
The huge Volkswagen festival known as Bug Jam will celebrate an anniversary of its own, its 30th, over the 22-24 July weekend.
Santa Pod’s new 50th Anniversary logo will adorn a full range of special anniversary merchandise soon to be launched for sale throughout the forthcoming year.
