Motor racing has returned to London in recent years thanks to Formula E. But, as we explain, it was a long and difficult road to bring the UK capital back to the motorsport map.
Motor racing proper - as opposed to short-oval competition, that is - had been absent from London since the Crystal Palace circuit shut its doors almost exactly 50 years ago. It would take until 2015 to return when the maiden season of Formula E climaxed with a thrilling double-header in Battersea Park.
Then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson had thrown his weight behind FE, which announced London as one of the first tranche of eight host cities in March 2013. The future prime minister described FE as a “scintillating prospect” for the city, pointing out that he was “hugely keen that London be involved in the birth of FE”.
“There were going to be changes to the roads so it was a kind of moving target,” recalls Agag. “We didn’t really know where we could have the track, so we had to discard that option.” Decent, but definitely not perfect: the inaugural London E-Prix wasn’t without its problems. The circuit was viewed by some as too tight and narrow, and Turn 1 was temporarily re-profiled for the first of the two races. Surface repairs to remove a bump allowed it to return to its original layout for day two of the meeting.
The activists forced a judicial review of the local council’s decision to give the go-ahead to the E-Prix. The problem for FE was that the hearing date fell just five weeks before the series was due to return to Battersea. The reasons why Crystal Palace never made it beyond the long list first time around also resulted in it being discarded as a viable fall-back option at the second time of asking. Much of the main straight has been grassed over, while the expansion of National Sports Centre, which incorporates an athletics track, in the mid-1970s had encroached upon the circuit layout.
The end of Battersea Park as an FE venue was the start of what turned out to be a four-season hiatus for the series from the city in which the FE organisation is based. But it wasn’t for want of trying. Post-Battersea, Agag targeted running a real street event, something that was made a realistic prospect by the Deregulation Act of 2015.
Half a dozen years on Agag, whose focus these days has turned from FE to the Extreme E off-road electric series, admits that he “walked around the Mall again and again thinking how we could make a race possible there”. It wasn’t the only option considered: there was also a track schemed incorporating the Embankment on the north side of the Thames in the vicinity of the City of London.Photo by: Alastair Staley /There were, however, any number of problems with the Mall.
“We realised it was going to be so expensive to race at the ExCeL,” he explains. “We basically didn’t have the money; when we came a bit more financially solid then we went there.”
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