Saving the most famous shed in motorsport: Ken Tyrrell's F1 'factory'

He sent two men, Neil Davis and Freddie Gear, to the WRAC’s premises to dismantle the 6m-by-21m shed, transport it to Ockham and re-erect it in his timberyard – a process now repeated more than 70 years later.

“The state of the shed was not too bad, given how long it had been there,” said Medcraft. “It’s a fairly solid structure made in a modular style, which made it easier to move and means it has lasted quite well.”

The shed has some history. It was here that in 1970 chief designer Derek Gardner secretly created with a small team of mechanics the first Tyrrell 001, as the team took the crucial next step into constructor status in the wake of Stewart’s first world title clinched in a Tyrrell-run Matra.

It was also here a few years later that Gardner prepared to shock the world with surely the most outlandish F1 car of them all: the P34 six-wheeler in which Jody Scheckter won 1976’s Swedish GP.

After that season, the F1 cars were constructed in a building next door, but the shed remained in use well into the 1980s as a fabrication shop and then for storage. When aerodynamicist Jean-Claude Migeot arrived in 1988, he immediately sought out the shed. “It was still there with the famous board: ‘Keep out. This means you!’,” he told me.

At the end of 1997, Tyrrell sold his team and F1 entry to the new British American Racing venture – which begat Honda, which begat Brawn GP, which begat Mercedes-AMG, based today out of not one but two much larger sheds in Brackley and Brixworth.

The original one continued to be used for storage by its new owner, but the site is now ripe for housing redevelopment – which triggered the salvage operation.

Goodwood secured its planning permission back in 2021, and finally in January this year the relocation began. First the asbestos roof had to be removed and disposed of, before carpentry and timber-frame specialist Alistair Kerr began the deconstruction work with a five-man team.

So how did Kerr take apart the shed, keeping in mind that he would need to reconstruct it piece by piece at Goodwood? “We took lots of pictures and labelled every part,” he says. “We were quite lucky, because it was a prefab building originally, so it was designed to come apart and be put back together again. We were just very methodical about it.”

Transporting the pieces required further care, then Kerr and his team completed the reconstruction in around two weeks.

All is as it was, except for new window frames to replace the rotten originals, a non-hazardous roof and retro-style electricity sockets, sourced after much poring over of period photos by the Goodwood team.