The British motorcycle Grand Prix is a motorcycling event that is part of the Grand Prix motorcycle racing season. Before 1977, the only British round was the Isle of Man TT, which was part of the championship from its inauguration in 1949 until 1976.
The Isle of Man TT was the most prestigous event on the Grand Prix motorcycling calendar from 1949-1972. After the 1972 event, multiple world champion Giacomo Agostini dropped a bombshell on the motorsports world by stating he would never race at the Isle of Man TT again, stating the 37-mile (62 km) circuit was too dangerous for international competition. His friend Gilberto Parlotti was killed during the event. Many riders followed Agostini's boycotting of the next 4 events, and after the 1976 season, the Isle of Man TT was scratched from the FIM calendar.
The first so-called British motorcycle Grand Prix in 1977 was the first held on the British mainland, at the Silverstone Circuit. The event moved to Donington Park in 1987, and back to Silverstone in 2010.
Read more about British Motorcycle Grand Prix: Winners of The British Motorcycle Grand Prix
Famous quotes containing the words british, motorcycle and/or grand:
“Swans moulting die, snow melts to tears,
Roses do blush and hang their heads,”
—Henry Noel, British poet, and William Strode, British poet. Beauty Extolled (attributed to Noel and to Strode)
“Actually being married seemed so crowded with unspoken rules and odd secrets and unfathomable responsibilities that it had no more occurred to her to imagine being married herself than it had to imagine driving a motorcycle or having a job. She had, however, thought about being a bride, which had more to do with being the center of attention and looking inexplicably, temporarily beautiful than it did with sharing a double bed with someone with hairy legs and a drawer full of boxer shorts.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)