Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the first Birmingham Superprix – a racing meeting which turned the city’s streets into a circuit – Graeme Brown looks back and asks industry experts if it would be a welcome event today.

It wasn’t exactly Monaco – in fact it was Birmingham on one of the wettest summer days in memory – but many people see the inaugural Birmingham Superprix as a moment in the sun for the region’s motorsport sector.

A quarter of a century has passed since the sodden streets of Birmingham hosted an event that may have only lasted three years but brought the likes of Damon Hill and Heinz-Harald Frentzen to the city.

It wasn’t universally popular and had its problems – not least a major cost to Birmingham City Council and the absence of a private buyer – but showed potential with 70,000 fans and television coverage from 35 countries worldwide.

The city council says there are no plans to resurrect the event but motorsport industry experts believe a celebration of that magnitude could be an ideal way to showcase a sector that employs more than 40,000 people in the centre of the country and help to solve a long-held problem of attracting young people into engineering.

The superprix was first dreamt up in the 1960s by racing fan Martin Hone and wrangles continued for years before an Act of Parliament – the Birmingham Road Race Bill – was approved in April 1985 giving the go-ahead for the festivities.

Chris Aylett, chief executive of the Motorsport Industry Association, attended the race and was involved with the On The Streets events in the build up.

He said: “I have been all over the world watching road racing and there is an appetite for racing through towns and cities.

"There are many examples – whether it be Long Beach in California, or Sweden or even Beijing. It is an accepted way of attracting people and businesses into cities. I have always thought this was an opportunity for the automotive sector in the UK and I think it would be enormously popular.

“I know some local people would be opposed to anything of that nature but if it was suitably counter-balanced it could be a huge success. They ought to be working now to get something like this going in Birmingham,” he added.

“Birmingham sits close to the heartland of Motorsports Valley which is a global business cluster with about 4,000 businesses in it – stretching from Norfolk through Birmingham and the West Midlands area through to the south of London.

“Its economic heartland is probably 30 miles south of Birmingham and if there is one city in the world that could benefit from an event like that it’s Birmingham.”

The first superprix took place on Sunday, August 24, 1986, and consisted of a Formula 3000 street race along 2.4 miles of city centre roads.

However, the original idea was conceived in the mid-1960s by local racer Martin Hone, and took years of lobbying and campaigning to become a reality.

It wasn’t until November 1984 that a huge step forward was taken when enthusiasts – backed by racing legend Stirling Moss – won their campaign to get the Birmingham Road Race Bill approved in Parliament.

Once it was passed, the city was the only one in the UK allowed to close its roads on an August Bank Holiday.

Mr Aylett said the event was supposed to be a festival of racing, community and music, and championing local engineering, although the original message was somewhat lost when management of the event changed hands.

However, he believes with a Midland motorsport sector encompassing 4,000 companies employing more than 40,000 people and working alongside 15 universities, there is still much to shout about.

Mr Aylett says there will be a knock-on effect to improvements in the automotive sector in general, as often the aerodynamics and energy efficiency in motorsport vehicles blaze a trail.

James Bailey, marketing and communications director at Goodyear Dunlop, was a spectator and said it was a major influence in encouraging him into engineering.

The firm’s Birmingham-based Dunlop Motorsport arm supplies motorsport customers and Mr Bailey believes an event to showcase the sector would be welcome.

He said: “From our point of view it would be something that would be welcome. Dunlop Motorsport makes racing tyres at Fort Dunlop – 200,000 a year – so it is a key part of our business and anything that promotes the growth of motorsport would be good for us.

“Secondly, we have been based in Birmingham for nearly 110 years and to have something like this to promote the city on an international scale would be something we would welcome.

“If we look at the broader region, rather than just Birmingham, central England can justifiably call itself the motorsport technology capital of the world.

“The whole area stretching up the M40 to Silverstone gets called ‘Motorsport Valley’ by the industry press.

“A lot of that is because Formula One teams are based in the UK. Even teams like Renault and Mercedes, that most people would perceive as French and German, are based at Oxford and Brackley.”

Mr Bailey said another potential reason to bring back the superprix is to encourage the engineers of the future.