Since The Grand Tour moved to a specials-only format, it has given up its test track. But the associated DriveTribe YouTube channel still needs a place to shoot videos, so it decided to find out what’s been going on at the site.
Turns out that, although the track still exists, it’s owned and operated by the British Science Museum. The hangars house a wide variety of things including airplanes, motorbikes, electric cars, hydrogen fuel cell cars, and even the world’s first hovercraft, according to Matt Moore, the associate director of the site.
And the museum group hasn’t just set up camp there to store stuff. They plan to use the test track for scientific purposes.
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“This site is primarily a storage site but it will be open to the public in 2024, so we’ll start having visitors coming and going from the site to see our collection,” says Moore. “But also, we’re transitioning into a science and innovation park where our focus will be using the outdoor space for autonomous vehicle testing, low carbon vehicle testing, and right the way through to the things that we see here being filmed today.”
And it sounds like the center would be happy to have DriveTribe rent the track every once in a while, which the channel is considering. But there are a few disadvantages to it. Namely, the fact that it’s not really a race track and that folds in on itself. These features mean that it would have to pay for marshalls and that it wouldn’t be able to race cars against one another at the same time.
As a result, it has proposed a few other options to become the home of the channel’s upcoming track videos for which it will be inviting friends like Abbie Eaton, Tiff Needell, and Jimmy Broadbent, “to have a muck about.”
The tracks are the old The Grand Tour test track, the Llandow circuit in Wales, Castle Combe, Thruxton, and a couple of old airfields around the U.K. And the channel wants your input on which to choose, so feel free to comment on the video if you have strong opinions about English (and Welsh) racetracks.