Chris Hall's excellent Rouen adventure!

For more stories and photos of contemporary day Rouen, see 6th Gear and The Finnish GPL Championship.

Bonus! Old snapshots from Rouen, circa 1967, submitted by Michel Delplace of the French GPL League. View the photos here.

Check the Historic Racing Circuits Photograph Archive for photographs and information of other circuits from yesteryear.

area map courtesy
of Darren Galpin's
GEL Motorsport
Information Page

Updated: March 11, 2005

In 1973 I was taken by my dad to Thruxton for the annual Easter Monday F2 race where amongst other better known drivers was a young Scottish driver called Gerry Birrell in his first full F2 season. As far as I remember, following the disqualification of a couple of cars (both were Rondels fielded by Ron Dennis I wonder what happened to him !?! & Neil Trundle), he finished on the podium.

A couple of months later, on a family holiday to France, we took the autoroute from Le Havre to Paris and having studied the Michelin map earlier in the day I realised that we would be passing the circuit at Rouen-Les-Essarts, where co-incidentally the F2 circus would be practising for the following days race. Given the time of day I eagerly looked out for signs of the track and in particular the cars in action. Eventually as we went over a bridge I was able to spot a number of BP banners in the distance to the right and then a flash of tarmac and armco amongst the trees, this being the new section of track built a couple of years earlier due to the new autoroute bisecting the old circuit. However, although I could see the marshals wandering about on the track there was no sign of any practice going on and we continued our long journey to the south of France.

It was only a few weeks later when a friend of my mum passed over copies of Motoring News that he had finished with that I realised that Birrell had died at pretty much the same time as we passed by at the other end of the circuit, his Chevron having suffered a puncture as he turned in to Six Freres and the head on impact with the barrier having proved unsurviveable, thus he joined Jean-Claude Bernasconi, Jo Schlesser, Jean Luc Salomon, Denis Dayan and Francois Burdet who had failed to return from what I think was, the real Spa-Francorchamps apart, the finest true road circuit in Europe if not the world.

Although I knew that motor racing was a dangerous sport, being aware via television of the deaths of Jim Clark and Jochen Rindt at an early age, I suppose that this was the point that it really hit home to me how perilous it really was ( and would continue to be during the 70's). I'd actually seen this bloke racing 3 months ago and now he'd been killed in a foreign country and I'd been within a mile or so of the scene that very day. I suppose that this was what started my fascination, morbid or otherwise, with the Circuit Des Essarts and fuelled my determination to one day visit the place where Birrell had met his untimely end.

It would take me 26 years.

Fast forward to September 1999:

Having driven from East London in our old Polo Estate, Ruth and I had taken the Thursday mid morning SeaFrance ferry from Dover to Calais and driven down to Neufchatel-en-Bray where we set up camp for the night. After buying her yet another posh dinner in a local bistro and managing to get a moderately pissed to aid the sleep process, we crashed out for the night, me dreaming of the day ahead, her dreaming of a comfortable bed in a house, rather than an airbed and a couple of duvets in a drafty tent.

The Friday dawned dank and misty and the conditions made me think of that fateful day in June 1968 when Jacky Ickx won his first Grand Prix, but Les Essarts claimed another victim. Having left the camp site at about 10 am, by just after 11 we were on the outskirts of the city of Rouen itself. At this point, we got completely lost ( As we would do again a year later on the way to Brittany ) and eventually I aimed the Polo in what I thought was a generally southward direction and hoped.

After about half an hour, we got to a road junction, turned right and I suddenly realised that we had gone around in a big circle and had arrived at the Nouveau Monde hairpin, rather than Scierie as originally planned. I suppose I was slightly disbelieving of my eyes at this point, since I found it difficult to realise that I'd finally got to the place I'd been vowing to visit for so long. What convinced me was seeing the cobbles at the hairpin ( Heinously to be tarmac'd over within a few months ). " This is it " I muttered to no one in particular.

From Nouveau Monde we drove in the wrong direction up the valley side toward the pits, so that I could stop at Six Freres and pay my respects to the long fallen hero that I'd seen race all those years ago. After a few minutes contemplation on my part, we headed on up the hill to the start area.

What follows is a description of how I found the circuit some 6 years after the last race held there.

The road from the area of Scierie ( Now a replaced by a bridge junction over the autoroute into Rouen city centre ) all the way to Nouveau Mode has been considerably widened and resurfaced and is full of lorries heading to and from the town of Evreux. All of the armco has also been removed, which is a pity as I hoped to find traces of the yellow paint marks that Alex Ribeiro had made on the barriers before the 1977 F2 race to help him identify turn-in points and apexes on the run down the hill.

At the time we visited, the pit buildings were still there, although inaccessible having been fenced off as was the concrete base of the main grandstand ( The roof having long gone ). Within months of our visit, both monuments to the former use of this piece of road had been demolished, something I find incredible since the city of Rouen proudly boasts to having more monuments than any other in France.

1. the pits

2. the start/finish line

Heading sharply downhill into turn one, it was possible to discern where the posts supporting the barriers had been sited. The corner itself would have been extremely quick and as with the rest of the track, there is absolutely no room for any run off area, which eventually led to it's demise.

3. into turn 1

Dropping steeply downhill toward turn two, I was reminded of Gorgio Francia's mega shunt in 1975 F2 practice. Apparently a clevis pin broke in the suspension, the car turned left into the armco and went end over end down the hill and vaulted the barrier where it demolished the marshal's hut on the outside of turn two, leaving a couple of terrified marshals hanging on to the remains for dear life. The car then dropped into the valley below. Somehow Francia got out with a broken wrist!!

I also remembered the ridiculous polystyrene block chicane set up for the race following Birrell's accident, that nearly caused Ronnie Peterson to be thrown over the barrier into the trees in his F2 Lotus.

4. towards turn 2

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