Have you tried driving a car as absolutely fast as it will go? On the road, I mean? No, me neither. At least, not since I was stupid years old.
The trouble is that cars go so incredibly fast, so if you try it, a bystander – ideally before you’ve had the accident and preferably not in a uniform that necessitates you reply with ‘officer’ – will point at you and tell you that this isn’t a race track.
Which, of course, it isn’t. The good news is that race tracks do exist and, if you wish, you can take your car to one.
They’re a much better place to exploit the handling and performance of cars, because there’s nobody coming the other way. And, given that you’re no longer driving fast on the road, you would think this would be a solution that suits everyone, wouldn’t you?
This being life, it doesn’t. You’re not haring past somebody’s front door any more, which is terrific, but, on a race track, there is a slight chance you will be haring relatively near somebody’s back garden. And if there’s one thing people don’t like, it’s being made aware that other people are having fun when they’re not. It seems there’s nothing people dislike quite as much as hearing other people enjoying themselves. Yes, even if they willingly bought a house near to a race track in the first place, thereby increasing their chances of this awful FOMO.
I understand that noise can be irritating. A gliding club local to my house recently got kicked off the airfield it used and, in place of basically silent objects in the sky, there’s now the more frequent engine noise while Baron von Oxfordshire attempts a motorised triple salchow. I notice this more than I do the gliders but, for one, I quite like planes and, for two, if it were going to bother me, I probably shouldn’t have bought a house three miles from an airfield. I would feel much the same about a race track.
Join the debate
Add your comment
I have no experience of living near a race track, but I do live very near to a main dual carriageway ring road, and the noise from this has increased considerably over the last 30 years I have lived there. General traffic noise is fine, It used to be that we'd get the idiot bikers mainly in the summertime doing ridiculous speeds with their screaming accompaniment, but now its a more all year round thing. But the main issue is now the 'premium' brand cars, with their sports exhausts permanently set, racing each other at all times of the day and night. How come the noise regs don't seem to matter any more?
And before someone says that a true petrol-head wouldn't mind this, we're talking horrible, artificial sounding exhaust notes here, with their computer generated pops and bangs so beloved by motoring journalists.
The article, and most replies, miss a fundamental point.
When racing or, if you prefer, track use was overwhelmingly confined to weekends, most people would be accepting of that so long as the event is run generally to within the established, noted, times. But that has all changed. It's not just about having one's Sunday in the garden disturbed. Since circuits have become wider businesses with general track days, testing, and experience days there's no doubt that disturbance has grown. I do not believe even track operators dispute that (that doesn't stop me believing that anyone moving to live near such a place, and then moans about it is a berk).
Circuits where I've done track days do noise testing, and rightly so. Not because of the neighbours, but because some Barrys have exhausts that defy good taste, and you don't have to be at a circuit to know that.
Sturges v. Bridgman was, I believe, the orignal, and precedent setting, 'came to the nuisance' case, about 150 years ago, and that was a far more conspicuous example than being a neighbour to a race track, so if the circuit owners (or their legal team) really are going with that then they need better legal advice. As Torque Stear wrote, the Planning (Agent of Change) Bill would have dealt with it, but was dropped. Beyod that people just don't bother enough with activism of this kind unless, or until, it really comes to their doorstep.
Doesn't have to be a race track either. The highways agency have recently spent millons installing sound baffle walls next to the M1 near us and resurfaced concrete stretches, to cut noise from tyres/engines disturbing local residents.
We seem to be getting more sensitive to noise as a population than I remember, but when EV's are rolled out will we actually miss traffic noise?