Zandvoort. To readers of a certain age, it is a name that will be as familiar as Kyalami, Watkins Glen or Fuji. For each of the past 35 years since the last Dutch Grand Prix was held there, there’s been a little bit of me that’s still a tiny bit surprised when I see it’s no longer on the calendar. Except it is now and, indeed, had it not been for the virus, would have been last year as well.
So what do we know about this place? Well I can tell you it’s a solid day’s drive from the UK on a route that takes you past Bruges, Antwerp, Breda and Rotterdam, west of Utrecht, south of Amsterdam and out to the North Sea coast near Haarlem. Last time I went which, I grant, was a while back, I found a pretty but entirely unremarkable seaside town.
But just up the coast to the north of the town lies a circuit where remarkable things just had a habit of happening. A full time racing circuit was created there after the war using a network of roads left behind by the German army, which former Le Mans-winning Bentley Boy SCH ‘Sammy’ Davis helped shape and integrate into a fast, flowing and at times flat-out hurtle through the dunes that characterise this part of the world.
