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Lost Track

Lost Track: Brynfan Tyddn

Following up on our last classic track piece on the Bridgehampton road circuit, let’s look at another track featured in the Last Open Road series of books. The Brynfan Tyddn road course saw action from 1952-56. “Brynfan Tyddn” is Welsh for “Large Farm on the Hilltop”, and consisted of a winding road around T. Nowell Wood’s 690 acre lake house estate. The race was an offshoot of a long running hillclimb event, the “Giant’s Despair”.
The running gag about the course in the book is how dangerous and tight the course is, despite it’s 3.5 mile track length. Looking at photos from the era, it’s not hard to see why. The road surface looked like crumbling asphalt barely a lane and a half wide, and looks more like a golf-cart track than a racing circuit – even in the days of back country racing of the early ’50s. Despite these shortcomings, the track drew huge numbers of fans and some interesting racers and cars. Carrol Shelby won this race in 1956 driving a Ferrari 500 Testa Rossa in what would be the last race for the course due to a track fatality.

But the 2.5 liter Ferrari’s win seems to have been an exception at Brynfan Tyddn as the course was historically dominated by smaller displacement racers: Keifts, Porsches, MGs, Siatas, and OSCAs. In fact, in the earliest years of the race, cars were limited to 1900cc engines. Perhaps maintaining the lower displacement rules would have kept the ’56 race safer and would have seen many more years circling Mr. Wood’s property.

Like the bulk of the road courses of the ’50s, the roads are still there, here’s a link to a Google map of the roads that made up the course, along with an approximate location of the start finish line. If you head out there, send me a photo.

Further Reading:

Also worth checking out is this scan of a 1952 Road & Track report from that summer’s outing.
You can buy prints of Carrol Shelby’s race and a brace of MGs from Wheels on Walls. Lots of great racing prints available there to cover your garage with.
Finally, here’s a lovely history of the races, complete with several records and other race results.

7 replies on “Lost Track: Brynfan Tyddn”

I live on church road. I’ve see a picture of the cars lined up next to where my drive way is to day.my house wasn’t built for another twenty years but carroll shelby won the race and he’s in the first car on the right. which is cool.I’d like to know more since I have always liked racing . I didn’t live here until seven years ago. I was a friend of troy ruttman when I lived in michigan. I wonder if he drove here. I know his son troy jr. was killed at pocono race way any my son sean was killed on one of the roads that was part of this track.

Eric, I also live on the Brynfan Tyddyn race track. We must be something nearing neighbors. Perhaps you’ve seen me zip by in my Ferrari or my Jaguar 4.2 Litre E-Type. Feel free to drop me an email. -Joe

Hello, all. I still live here on the old Brynfan Tyddyn racetrack. I had the honor of racing around it with Mr Ted Rounds in the passenger seat of my wife’s Mini Cooper a few years ago! He raced on this track in July, 1952, and came in 2nd place in an MG TD. His average lap time (measured over 10 laps) was 3.9 minutes per lap – pretty damned good considering that he was racing on a dirt/unimproved road in a car with drum-and-shoe brakes, knee-action shocks, and the equivalent of bicycle wheels. After meeting at a BCC-NEPA event and enjoying an adult beverage together, he became a close friend as we spent visits and phone calls talking about suspension technology and internal combustion systems. “The Legend” (as he was known) passed away earlier this year after a brief hospital stay just as we’d made plans to meet again and, as a result of the friendship we shared, his family honored me and sent me all his racing books, racetrack movies and road-racing paraphernalia. He was a fine, well spoken and very accomplished gentleman of another era. I still periodically hit the Brynfan Tyddyn track in my 4.2L E-Type, my Ferrari or one of my Porsches, just to see how close I can get to his lap time.
— Rest east, Mr Rounds – and tell Carroll I said “Hi.” -Joe

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